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Every once and then I remember that you can actually patent algorithms. Terror ensues, and a general feeling of frustration and helplesness. Then I try to for

Every once and then I remember that you can actually patent algorithms. Terror ensues, and a general feeling of frustration and helplesness. Then I try to forget this fact slowly, just to be able to continue living in this crazy world. As a mathematician, i see algorithms as examples of theorems, and the idea to "patent" a theorem, a mathematical truth, is so foreign!

jMyles 7y ago
> As a mathematician You don't need to be a mathematician to see that the current system of IP is completely contrary to the nature of the universe. It will be over soon.
- mikro2nd 7y ago
  I'm curious to know what gives you confidence that it will be over soon?
  - mrighele 7y ago
    Partially in jest, once/if Chinese companies start to hold more patents than American companies (as in "value", not numbers) you will see the US attitude versus patents to be different.
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      Thats quite optimistic. I'd say that if they steal from the Chinese, they won't talk about it much (or say it was the other way around) and continue just the way it was in case they come up with something patentable again.
    - taffer 7y ago
      Did the British attitude to patents change when German companies started owning more patents than British companies?
      - oblio 7y ago
        Yes, when those patents started pointing guns at British interests :)
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        Not a patent example, but there's a reason "asprin" is a generic term in the US.
      - justincormack 7y ago
        Yes. For example the British arranged to cancel all German patents after ww2. This led to eg the development of the Japanese camera industry among many other things.
        taffer 7y ago
        I fail to see the parallels between Germany after World War II and China in 2019. China's patent situation is much closer to Germany in the late 19th century and the British didn't throw away their patent system in the 19th century just because Germany patented more.
    - mikro2nd 7y ago
      You may be correct regarding American response. I'd suggest that alongside that, what we're likely to see is the Chinese government significantly tightening up on IP-rights enforcement because it would then be to their advantage to do so. So a nett result of greater IP-rights enforcement globally rather than the original optimistic/hopeful "it will be over soon" assessment.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  contrary to the nature of the universe? That seems a few levels lower than merely unworkable, I mean a penny falling slower than a bowling ball is contrary to the nature of the universe, I don't think patents contravene anything as primary as gravity.
  - neiman 7y ago
    You can't patent math theorems because they are not considered inventions, but rather discovering a logical laws of the universe. I treat algorithms in a similar manner.
  - mrzool 7y ago
    Hyperbole | /hʌɪˈpəːbəli/ | noun Exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally. — The Oxford Dictionary
- londons_explore 7y ago
  The current IP system is pretty decent.... Just all time limits should be adjusted to 1 year. If I invent something, a 1 year headstart in the market should be plenty of reward.
  - hannasanarion 7y ago
    Seems short, especially for low-yield ip like music. 10-20 is probably good
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      If copyright only lasted a year, you can bet the industry would move to much shorter release cycles and still capture most of the value.
      - gomox 7y ago
        Actually research would move in the direction of things whose value can be captured within a year. The patent system shapes the IP industry as whole.
    - enriquto 7y ago
      They are talking about patents here. It has nothing to do with copyright which concerns music and which is perfectly alright. It certainly does not help that they use the ambiguous term IP that does not really mean anything.
- pron 7y ago
  There is nothing in the nature of the universe that's contrary to trade agreements among people, of which patents are one example. You could say that some agreements are unenforceable under current conditions or perhaps undesirable or even silly, but unless people agree to violate the laws of physics, the universe is agnostic to human contracts. As I wrote in another comment, patents do not protect some truth -- actually, their entire purpose was to help spread truths -- just applications (and human ones, not natural ones).
- daver00 7y ago
  > It will be over soon The universe or the patent system?
jlawson 7y ago
I am not super pro-patent, but I don't think it's totally wild to patent an algorithm. Algorithms can be extremely hard to discover and extremely valuable. Together these facts are why the patent system can usefully apply, same as traditional patent classes. And lots of traditional types of patents are "algorithms" too, really. It's not that different from, say, patenting a drug. The algorithm to manufacture [insert expensive drug here] probably isn't that hard to follow, but it was very hard to discover, and we want to encourage more people to discover more algorithms like this. The real issue is that the people in the court system can't understand the different between trivial, straightforward, somewhat advanced, and truly sophisticated algorithms. Also, since you don't need to risk health and life to test them, computer algorithms are typically easier to test than drugs, so it's likely that few-to-none of them satisfy the "difficult to invent" standard that drug molecules do. It costs like a billion dollars to develop a drug; PageRank was made by a few guys in a room in a matter of months. As another interesting point of comparison, a lot of old weird gun designs from the late 19th/early 20th century were made to get around patents. It's dumb to make a "blow-forward" pistol but there was a time when the straightforward "blow-back" system was patented. Whole countries used quite weird and suboptimal weapons for a long time simply to avoid patent entanglements. I'm sure to them it seemed similar - how can you patent putting these 2 pieces of metal together in this shape? These systems were not very complicated.
- enriquto 7y ago
  I totally cannot bend my mind around this. It is irrelevant if patents on algorithms are useful and good for society in some cases. They are so much self-evidently wrong that the point is moot. The fact that "trivial" algorithms can be patented is a different question that I am not addressing. I am talking only about the non-trivial algorithms that require a stroke of genius. Imagine that Euclid's algorithm was patented? Or Pythagoras theorem? Or the definition of exterior derivative? Or the expression of a function as Fourier series? All of these are valuable ideas that are non-trivial to come by. The same argument for software patents applies to each of these cases, and in all these cases it is evident (to me) that these mathematical constructions cannot be patented, and that society cannot grant monopoly of their usage to their discoverers.
LudwigNagasena 7y ago
Every patent and even every technology is basically an algorithm. And they are valuable because they are true (not sure how mathematical truth is different from any other type of truth).
- rawoke083600 7y ago
  agreed ! Also their is a lot of hard work and engineering in offering the solution as well... Just knowing the algorithm wont help.
bartimus 7y ago
Would you, as a mathematician, prefer a world where innovative theorems become covered in secrecy if it means such things couldn't be patented anymore?
- enriquto 7y ago
  I do not understand what you are talking about. In our world, you cannot patent theorems but people publish them anyway. Why? for the honor of human spirit, or to impress chicks, whatever.
  - taffer 7y ago
    I think what he's referring to is that you have to publish your invention to get it patented. The idea of patents was basically to get a temporary monopoly for publishing the secret sauce so that anyone can use your invention after the protection period is over.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    I wouldn't take it for granted that people publish. Many mathematicians work on wall street, and they would never publish something they came up with if it wasnt 10000% certain the theorem isnt a commercial secret. Money wins all, especially in mathematics half of which was invented to make counting money easier.
    - enriquto 7y ago
      Yes, of course. Not all known theorems are published immediately. What is the problem with that? Hiding a truth you have discovered is OK. "Owning" a truth that you have told everyone is absurd.
      - vikramkr 7y ago
        Owning a truth for a limited period of time in return for telling everyone instead of keeping it a secret is not absurd. Society would rather you tell people so people can build on it (at least in noncommercial ways, or via license) while you own it than keep it secret, so we created the patent system. The alternative could easily be trade secrets until you die and never reveal it, and as a society we decided to incentivize you to not do that
jgtrosh 7y ago
I have helped patent my work for my company against bonuses and it's a source of personal shame even though most people I tell this seem to think it's very honorable.
Waterluvian 7y ago
I think I get what you're saying. It's like patenting the theory of gravity. You're just describing some intrinsic logical fact about this universe.
pron 7y ago
> i see algorithms as examples of theorems, and the idea to "patent" a theorem, a mathematical truth, is so foreign! I'm not defending the patenting of algorithms [1], but what is protected by algorithm patents is not their mathematical truth -- quite the opposite, in fact, as I'll explain -- just as what is protected by mechanical patents is not some physical truth. You are free to publish a patented algorithm (provided you don't copy your text verbatim from a copyrighted source), teach it, study it, etc. to spread that truth and expand it. What you're not allowed to do without permission from the patent owner is to implement it and run it on a computer; i.e. what is protected is not a truth but a certain human action. This is the same for mechanical inventions, which could be equally said to be "physical truths": a mechanism built in this way would, according to the laws of physics, behave in that particular way etc. Similarly, you are allowed to publish and study that physical truth -- what you're not allowed to do is to build it. Again, I'm not saying whether this is right or wrong, only pointing out that it is not truth that's protected by patents, but application. In fact, one of the original motivations for patent protection is precisely to encourage people to not keep doscovered truths secret by promising them that profitable applications would be reserved to them for some period of time. So patents were designed to help spread truth in exchange for protecting applications. That this is what patents are intended to do is a fact. It's fine to object to patents -- there are good arguments both in favor and against -- but completely misunderstanding what patents are and what it is that they protect is not one of them. [1]: I'm not in principle against that, either, except that in practice few patented algorithms rise to the level of inventiveness that patents are intended to protect.
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  > This is the same for mechanical inventions And just like with software patents, people come up with weird workarounds: > Sun-and-planet motion. The spur-gear to the right, called the planet-gear, is tied to the center of the other, or sun-gear, by an arm which preserves a constant distance between their centers. This was used as a substitute for the crank in a steam engine by James Watt, after the use of the crank had been patented by another party. Each revolution of the planet-gear, which is rigidly attached to the connecting-rod, gives two to the sun-gear, which is keyed to the fly-wheel shaft. http://507movements.com/mm_039.html http://507movements.com/mm_039.html If you look at the animation at the link, you can see it's just a crank with two extra gears attached
JohnStrangeII 7y ago
Same here(though not a mathematician). Patenting algorithms is so horribly wrong on every level, it's still beyond my comprehension how this could ever be allowed. Some of the patents are ridiculously absurd and luckily rarely enforced. I remember the guy on sci.crypt who had a patent on "cascading ciphers", which covered almost any cipher build out of smaller cryptographic building blocks. It basically concerned almost any stream cipher mode and any attempt of combining more than one building block with XOR somewhere. Luckily, the guy never had the money to enforce it although he might have earned some royalties from doing nothing. Heck, Siemens used to have a German patent on the Internet, except that it wasn't called Internet but something like "making available of structured textual data representations via long-range data transmission", etc.
derefr 7y ago
Ah, but you’re not patenting the theorem! Remember what happens when drug companies re-discover a useful molecule that turns out to have “prior art” as a molecule that people have been consuming in some every-day herb or some-such. They can’t patent that molecule (because they didn’t invent it), and there’s no profit motive to go through FDA compliance for a non-patented drug. But, there’s nothing stopping them from finding the “theorem” behind the “algorithm”—figuring out what it is about the molecule’s structure that makes it have the effect it has—and then discovering another molecule in the same class (another “algorithm” constructively proving the same “theorem”), and then patenting that. Same is true for actual algorithms: if PageRank is patented, I can just look at the theorem behind it—efficient eigenvalue derivation—and then come up with a different constructive proof of it. It’s easy once you know it’s possible. And, because there are so many known isomorphisms between algorithms (e.g. between algorithms on pointer machines vs. RAM word machines) there are often “obvious” transformations of the algorithm that aren’t considered the same algorithm from the patent office’s POV. (And, I mean, technically they aren’t; they might have a very slightly higher time-complexity, by a factor of the inverse Ackermann function or something. But these are things that don’t matter in practice, just like the random extra bits that the drug companies tack onto their molecules don’t matter in practice.)
- VistaBrokeMyPC 7y ago
  See: Johnson & Johnson/Janssen Pharmaceutica esketamine patent. [0] The FDA just approved the use of the drug, [1] which is basically a ketamine molecule cut in half (ketamine is a racemic molecule), [2] and J&J is selling it for HUNDREDS of dollars per treatment, while regular Ketalar brand ketamine is damn-near as cheap as saline. [0] https://patents.justia.com/patent/20140093592 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20140093592 [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/05/700509903/fda-clears-esketamine-nasal-spray-for-hard-to-treat-depression https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/05/7005099... [2] Arketamine (R(-) - isomer) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Arketamine_structure.svg/400px-Arketamine_structure.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Ar... Esketamine (S(+) - isomer) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Esketamine2DCSD.svg/300px-Esketamine2DCSD.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Es...
nickjj 7y ago
I run into this scenario a lot as a freelance developer. Companies often request that any code you write that's a part of their contract work must not leave that project and they own all IP rights to every line of code you deliver. Which isn't reasonable most of the time because technically if you imported a library from Python's standard library you can't import that library again in another project without violating the contract. Or if you pasted in a snippet of code from a library's documentation, since you did it on their time, you can't use it again on another project. I always do my best to get things reworded to differentiate generic code from business / trade secrets code, and then for the generic code they either license the code from me as MIT or I license the code from them as MIT.
jandrewrogers 7y ago
It makes a bit more sense if, like the patent office, you view it through the lens of "subject matter directly reducible to an electronic circuit design". Algorithms that meet this criterion are, by necessity, patentable in every country that allows patenting of electronic circuit designs. Most theorems in mathematics are not like this. (This is a deep rabbit hole. All mechanical patents have the same theoretical equivalence to computer algorithms, though less obvious. The lines that define patentable subject matter do not have a rigorous basis, it is an arbitrary convention.) This is also why so-called business method patents (i.e. doing X, but on the Internet), which are often improperly conflated with algorithm patents under the rubric of "software patents", are generally not patentable.

jMyles 7y ago

> As a mathematician You don't need to be a mathematician to see that the current system of IP is completely contrary to the nature of the universe. It will be over soon.

mikro2nd 7y ago
I'm curious to know what gives you confidence that it will be over soon?
- mrighele 7y ago
  Partially in jest, once/if Chinese companies start to hold more patents than American companies (as in "value", not numbers) you will see the US attitude versus patents to be different.
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    Thats quite optimistic. I'd say that if they steal from the Chinese, they won't talk about it much (or say it was the other way around) and continue just the way it was in case they come up with something patentable again.
  - taffer 7y ago
    Did the British attitude to patents change when German companies started owning more patents than British companies?
    - oblio 7y ago
      Yes, when those patents started pointing guns at British interests :)
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Not a patent example, but there's a reason "asprin" is a generic term in the US.
    - justincormack 7y ago
      Yes. For example the British arranged to cancel all German patents after ww2. This led to eg the development of the Japanese camera industry among many other things.
      - taffer 7y ago
        I fail to see the parallels between Germany after World War II and China in 2019. China's patent situation is much closer to Germany in the late 19th century and the British didn't throw away their patent system in the 19th century just because Germany patented more.
  - mikro2nd 7y ago
    You may be correct regarding American response. I'd suggest that alongside that, what we're likely to see is the Chinese government significantly tightening up on IP-rights enforcement because it would then be to their advantage to do so. So a nett result of greater IP-rights enforcement globally rather than the original optimistic/hopeful "it will be over soon" assessment.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
contrary to the nature of the universe? That seems a few levels lower than merely unworkable, I mean a penny falling slower than a bowling ball is contrary to the nature of the universe, I don't think patents contravene anything as primary as gravity.
- neiman 7y ago
  You can't patent math theorems because they are not considered inventions, but rather discovering a logical laws of the universe. I treat algorithms in a similar manner.
- mrzool 7y ago
  Hyperbole | /hʌɪˈpəːbəli/ | noun Exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally. — The Oxford Dictionary
londons_explore 7y ago
The current IP system is pretty decent.... Just all time limits should be adjusted to 1 year. If I invent something, a 1 year headstart in the market should be plenty of reward.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  Seems short, especially for low-yield ip like music. 10-20 is probably good
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    If copyright only lasted a year, you can bet the industry would move to much shorter release cycles and still capture most of the value.
    - gomox 7y ago
      Actually research would move in the direction of things whose value can be captured within a year. The patent system shapes the IP industry as whole.
  - enriquto 7y ago
    They are talking about patents here. It has nothing to do with copyright which concerns music and which is perfectly alright. It certainly does not help that they use the ambiguous term IP that does not really mean anything.
pron 7y ago
There is nothing in the nature of the universe that's contrary to trade agreements among people, of which patents are one example. You could say that some agreements are unenforceable under current conditions or perhaps undesirable or even silly, but unless people agree to violate the laws of physics, the universe is agnostic to human contracts. As I wrote in another comment, patents do not protect some truth -- actually, their entire purpose was to help spread truths -- just applications (and human ones, not natural ones).
daver00 7y ago
> It will be over soon The universe or the patent system?

jlawson 7y ago

I am not super pro-patent, but I don't think it's totally wild to patent an algorithm. Algorithms can be extremely hard to discover and extremely valuable. Together these facts are why the patent system can usefully apply, same as traditional patent classes. And lots of traditional types of patents are "algorithms" too, really. It's not that different from, say, patenting a drug. The algorithm to manufacture [insert expensive drug here] probably isn't that hard to follow, but it was very hard to discover, and we want to encourage more people to discover more algorithms like this. The real issue is that the people in the court system can't understand the different between trivial, straightforward, somewhat advanced, and truly sophisticated algorithms. Also, since you don't need to risk health and life to test them, computer algorithms are typically easier to test than drugs, so it's likely that few-to-none of them satisfy the "difficult to invent" standard that drug molecules do. It costs like a billion dollars to develop a drug; PageRank was made by a few guys in a room in a matter of months. As another interesting point of comparison, a lot of old weird gun designs from the late 19th/early 20th century were made to get around patents. It's dumb to make a "blow-forward" pistol but there was a time when the straightforward "blow-back" system was patented. Whole countries used quite weird and suboptimal weapons for a long time simply to avoid patent entanglements. I'm sure to them it seemed similar - how can you patent putting these 2 pieces of metal together in this shape? These systems were not very complicated.

enriquto 7y ago
I totally cannot bend my mind around this. It is irrelevant if patents on algorithms are useful and good for society in some cases. They are so much self-evidently wrong that the point is moot. The fact that "trivial" algorithms can be patented is a different question that I am not addressing. I am talking only about the non-trivial algorithms that require a stroke of genius. Imagine that Euclid's algorithm was patented? Or Pythagoras theorem? Or the definition of exterior derivative? Or the expression of a function as Fourier series? All of these are valuable ideas that are non-trivial to come by. The same argument for software patents applies to each of these cases, and in all these cases it is evident (to me) that these mathematical constructions cannot be patented, and that society cannot grant monopoly of their usage to their discoverers.

LudwigNagasena 7y ago

Every patent and even every technology is basically an algorithm. And they are valuable because they are true (not sure how mathematical truth is different from any other type of truth).

rawoke083600 7y ago
agreed ! Also their is a lot of hard work and engineering in offering the solution as well... Just knowing the algorithm wont help.

bartimus 7y ago

Would you, as a mathematician, prefer a world where innovative theorems become covered in secrecy if it means such things couldn't be patented anymore?

enriquto 7y ago
I do not understand what you are talking about. In our world, you cannot patent theorems but people publish them anyway. Why? for the honor of human spirit, or to impress chicks, whatever.
- taffer 7y ago
  I think what he's referring to is that you have to publish your invention to get it patented. The idea of patents was basically to get a temporary monopoly for publishing the secret sauce so that anyone can use your invention after the protection period is over.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  I wouldn't take it for granted that people publish. Many mathematicians work on wall street, and they would never publish something they came up with if it wasnt 10000% certain the theorem isnt a commercial secret. Money wins all, especially in mathematics half of which was invented to make counting money easier.
  - enriquto 7y ago
    Yes, of course. Not all known theorems are published immediately. What is the problem with that? Hiding a truth you have discovered is OK. "Owning" a truth that you have told everyone is absurd.
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      Owning a truth for a limited period of time in return for telling everyone instead of keeping it a secret is not absurd. Society would rather you tell people so people can build on it (at least in noncommercial ways, or via license) while you own it than keep it secret, so we created the patent system. The alternative could easily be trade secrets until you die and never reveal it, and as a society we decided to incentivize you to not do that

jgtrosh 7y ago

I have helped patent my work for my company against bonuses and it's a source of personal shame even though most people I tell this seem to think it's very honorable.

Waterluvian 7y ago

I think I get what you're saying. It's like patenting the theory of gravity. You're just describing some intrinsic logical fact about this universe.

pron 7y ago

> i see algorithms as examples of theorems, and the idea to "patent" a theorem, a mathematical truth, is so foreign! I'm not defending the patenting of algorithms [1], but what is protected by algorithm patents is not their mathematical truth -- quite the opposite, in fact, as I'll explain -- just as what is protected by mechanical patents is not some physical truth. You are free to publish a patented algorithm (provided you don't copy your text verbatim from a copyrighted source), teach it, study it, etc. to spread that truth and expand it. What you're not allowed to do without permission from the patent owner is to implement it and run it on a computer; i.e. what is protected is not a truth but a certain human action. This is the same for mechanical inventions, which could be equally said to be "physical truths": a mechanism built in this way would, according to the laws of physics, behave in that particular way etc. Similarly, you are allowed to publish and study that physical truth -- what you're not allowed to do is to build it. Again, I'm not saying whether this is right or wrong, only pointing out that it is not truth that's protected by patents, but application. In fact, one of the original motivations for patent protection is precisely to encourage people to not keep doscovered truths secret by promising them that profitable applications would be reserved to them for some period of time. So patents were designed to help spread truth in exchange for protecting applications. That this is what patents are intended to do is a fact. It's fine to object to patents -- there are good arguments both in favor and against -- but completely misunderstanding what patents are and what it is that they protect is not one of them. [1]: I'm not in principle against that, either, except that in practice few patented algorithms rise to the level of inventiveness that patents are intended to protect.

vanderZwan 7y ago
> This is the same for mechanical inventions And just like with software patents, people come up with weird workarounds: > Sun-and-planet motion. The spur-gear to the right, called the planet-gear, is tied to the center of the other, or sun-gear, by an arm which preserves a constant distance between their centers. This was used as a substitute for the crank in a steam engine by James Watt, after the use of the crank had been patented by another party. Each revolution of the planet-gear, which is rigidly attached to the connecting-rod, gives two to the sun-gear, which is keyed to the fly-wheel shaft. http://507movements.com/mm_039.html http://507movements.com/mm_039.html If you look at the animation at the link, you can see it's just a crank with two extra gears attached

JohnStrangeII 7y ago

Same here(though not a mathematician). Patenting algorithms is so horribly wrong on every level, it's still beyond my comprehension how this could ever be allowed. Some of the patents are ridiculously absurd and luckily rarely enforced. I remember the guy on sci.crypt who had a patent on "cascading ciphers", which covered almost any cipher build out of smaller cryptographic building blocks. It basically concerned almost any stream cipher mode and any attempt of combining more than one building block with XOR somewhere. Luckily, the guy never had the money to enforce it although he might have earned some royalties from doing nothing. Heck, Siemens used to have a German patent on the Internet, except that it wasn't called Internet but something like "making available of structured textual data representations via long-range data transmission", etc.

derefr 7y ago

Ah, but you’re not patenting the theorem! Remember what happens when drug companies re-discover a useful molecule that turns out to have “prior art” as a molecule that people have been consuming in some every-day herb or some-such. They can’t patent that molecule (because they didn’t invent it), and there’s no profit motive to go through FDA compliance for a non-patented drug. But, there’s nothing stopping them from finding the “theorem” behind the “algorithm”—figuring out what it is about the molecule’s structure that makes it have the effect it has—and then discovering another molecule in the same class (another “algorithm” constructively proving the same “theorem”), and then patenting that. Same is true for actual algorithms: if PageRank is patented, I can just look at the theorem behind it—efficient eigenvalue derivation—and then come up with a different constructive proof of it. It’s easy once you know it’s possible. And, because there are so many known isomorphisms between algorithms (e.g. between algorithms on pointer machines vs. RAM word machines) there are often “obvious” transformations of the algorithm that aren’t considered the same algorithm from the patent office’s POV. (And, I mean, technically they aren’t; they might have a very slightly higher time-complexity, by a factor of the inverse Ackermann function or something. But these are things that don’t matter in practice, just like the random extra bits that the drug companies tack onto their molecules don’t matter in practice.)

VistaBrokeMyPC 7y ago
See: Johnson & Johnson/Janssen Pharmaceutica esketamine patent. [0] The FDA just approved the use of the drug, [1] which is basically a ketamine molecule cut in half (ketamine is a racemic molecule), [2] and J&J is selling it for HUNDREDS of dollars per treatment, while regular Ketalar brand ketamine is damn-near as cheap as saline. [0] https://patents.justia.com/patent/20140093592 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20140093592 [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/05/700509903/fda-clears-esketamine-nasal-spray-for-hard-to-treat-depression https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/05/7005099... [2] Arketamine (R(-) - isomer) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Arketamine_structure.svg/400px-Arketamine_structure.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Ar... Esketamine (S(+) - isomer) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Esketamine2DCSD.svg/300px-Esketamine2DCSD.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Es...

nickjj 7y ago

I run into this scenario a lot as a freelance developer. Companies often request that any code you write that's a part of their contract work must not leave that project and they own all IP rights to every line of code you deliver. Which isn't reasonable most of the time because technically if you imported a library from Python's standard library you can't import that library again in another project without violating the contract. Or if you pasted in a snippet of code from a library's documentation, since you did it on their time, you can't use it again on another project. I always do my best to get things reworded to differentiate generic code from business / trade secrets code, and then for the generic code they either license the code from me as MIT or I license the code from them as MIT.

jandrewrogers 7y ago

It makes a bit more sense if, like the patent office, you view it through the lens of "subject matter directly reducible to an electronic circuit design". Algorithms that meet this criterion are, by necessity, patentable in every country that allows patenting of electronic circuit designs. Most theorems in mathematics are not like this. (This is a deep rabbit hole. All mechanical patents have the same theoretical equivalence to computer algorithms, though less obvious. The lines that define patentable subject matter do not have a rigorous basis, it is an arbitrary convention.) This is also why so-called business method patents (i.e. doing X, but on the Internet), which are often improperly conflated with algorithm patents under the rubric of "software patents", are generally not patentable.