[Commons-Law] Re: [Fwd: software patents: apparent good news for India]

[Aniruddha Shankar]

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Lawrence Liang wrote:
> I would disagree completely  with the interpretation, what the phrase means
> is that yes a computer program per se is not patentable but the question
> then is what are not computer programs per se?

There've been no Indian judgements on this question, right? So how does
one get a definitive answer on whether you can, in India, patent a
method[1] for displaying a popup note when your mouse moves over an
element in a computer program? Is the consensus that since the method is
not a computer program per se, you can patent it?

> And if you loook at the
> development of cases in the uS on software patents, the expansion has been
> on the basis of proving that the invention in question is not a computer
> progam per se or as such

Thanks so much for the notes :) The notes refer to but do not cite
Diamond v. Chakrabarty[2] and 35 USCS § 101[3], which I found the links
for, if anyone's interested.

After exercising my creaking atrophied-from-disuse legal skills, yes, it
definitely seems that while Rich, J., has stated that abstract ideas are
not patentable, the court's held that if a software "element" performed
a "particularly claimed combination of calculations", the  conjunction
of those calculations (despite the fact that they spring from "abstract
ideas") with the performance of a particular, specific, task was indeed
patentable. Right?

Cheers,
Aniruddha "Karim" Shankar


[1]
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6606101.WKU.&OS=PN/6606101&RS=PN/6606101
[2] http://www.law.uconn.edu/homes/swilf/ip/statutes/patent101.htm
[3]
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~jones/tmp352/projects98/group13/genelegal2.html
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