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Ptents in theory are meant to blanace a public bad (a monopoly) with a public good (teaching practitioners how to do something). I am a programmer, and I do not
by cabalamat 17y ago
Ptents in theory are meant to blanace a public bad (a monopoly) with a public good (teaching practitioners how to do something). I am a programmer, and I do not understand software patents. I'm sure I'm not the oonly one. If a typical practitioner of an art, when seeing a patent, says its hard to understand or confusingly worded, the patent should be void.
- 10ren 17y agoI think there's a good argument for that approach being applied to the description of the patent. That's the part that a person skilled in the art should be able to use to make the invention. However, it's not so applicable to the claims of the patent. This part is for lawyers to use to determine the exact extent of the legal protection conferred by the patent. The description is of just one embodiment of the invention; it is natural that slight variations from that embodiment should also be covered - but exactly how much variation is covered? How general (or how abstract) is the coverage? Especially when you consider that the given embodiment isn't necessarily the "center" of the inventions - it is not the embodiment, just an embodiment. This extent is difficult to specify, and special language is needed. To use jordyhoyt's analogy, it would be like expecting Erlang to be readable by a layman. Of course, we can do better. The point is that it's hard to serve many masters.
- cabalamat 17y ago> To use jordyhoyt's analogy, it would be like expecting Erlang to be readable by a layman. If lawyerese for a formally-defined language with a compiler and everything, I'd have less problems with it. But from whetre I'm standing, it just looks like obfuscated English.