Supreme Court Tackles Dangerous Patent Ruling
With computers it should be considered more like a ‘trade secret’ than a pattent.
With any food there are only so many ways to prepare it.
Take for instance hamburgers. You can can boil, microwave, fry, or flame broil it. That’s about it, and that’s what these companies are patenting.
There are only so many ways you can program a computer to read a byte from a disk. This is exactly what’s going on. How you prepare, and store the meat after that in a resturaunt after that it’s a trade secret. I don’t think you can pattent the process.
If a company came along and said they invented auctions, pattented it then all companies wanting to hold an auction would then have to liscence the rights to auction.
Auctioning has been around for years, and the concept wether actual or virtual shouldn’t even be considered in the pattent process, as well as posting an a bulliten board/forum, voting just about anything.
You would laugh if you heard of a company pattenting the concept of you standing in a check out line, or picking up a phone, but these are the exact things that are being pattented in the digital world.
Just to name 1 off the top of my head is M$’s “double click” pattent which is just as normal an action as you opening a door.