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So your view its "absurd" to consider what would have happened had a plausible scenario occurred to discover the implications? Clearly this is nonsense. Moving

So your view its "absurd" to consider what would have happened had a plausible scenario occurred to discover the implications? Clearly this is nonsense. Moving on. >FFT, and things like it, are exactly the sort of software that should not be patented. Again, you are judging patentability by the impact of the idea. This is nonsense. For every idea worth patenting that has been invented, the world would be better off if everyone could use that idea unencumbered. This is a tautology. The interesting question is: how many of those ideas would remain trade secrets if they weren't patentable? This is the meaningful question here. Had IBM chosen to keep it secret (and perhaps it would have been a smart business decision to do so), the world would be decidedly worse off. If they had patented it, the world would be better off compared to the world where that invention was kept a trade secret. This is the meaningful conclusion to be drawn from the FFT scenario. So you don't like hypotheticals? Fine--lets consider Watson. How it works is currently a trade secret. Is the world better off for them keeping it a secret or publicizing and patenting it? I'll let you decide that one.

CamperBob2 13y ago
Cooley and Tukey didn't so much invent the FFT as rediscover it. The earliest description was (as usual) buried in one of Carl Friedrich Gauss's notebooks. By the 1960s, the algorithm's time had come. It is inconceivable that it would have remained obscure for much longer -- patent or no patent, trade secret or no trade secret. Software simply does not work that way.
- hackinthebochs 13y ago
  Yes, lets avoid the interesting discussion with irrelevant and uninteresting tangential points.
rayiner 13y ago
Its not just whether these inventions would be kept trade secrets. In the world where you deliver physical products to people, its very easy for a company in China to just reverse engineer it then undercut you because they don't pay for R&D. In that space, a lot of these inventions just wouldn't happen because companies wouldn't bother sinking a ton of money into them.

CamperBob2 13y ago

Cooley and Tukey didn't so much invent the FFT as rediscover it. The earliest description was (as usual) buried in one of Carl Friedrich Gauss's notebooks. By the 1960s, the algorithm's time had come. It is inconceivable that it would have remained obscure for much longer -- patent or no patent, trade secret or no trade secret. Software simply does not work that way.

hackinthebochs 13y ago
Yes, lets avoid the interesting discussion with irrelevant and uninteresting tangential points.

rayiner 13y ago

Its not just whether these inventions would be kept trade secrets. In the world where you deliver physical products to people, its very easy for a company in China to just reverse engineer it then undercut you because they don't pay for R&D. In that space, a lot of these inventions just wouldn't happen because companies wouldn't bother sinking a ton of money into them.