Thursday, April 18, 2013
Natural Phenomena? #25
An article on Patentlyo says that the supreme court has ruled that abstract ideas, natural phenomena, and laws of nature are now ineligible for patent protection even when previously unknown or discovered. In the article there is a poll you can take that asks: Whether you think those non-textual exclusions should be treated as "prior-art. The results are as follows: abstract ideas 20%, natural phenomena 32%, laws of nature 32%, and none of the above 15%. I would really like to know how someone could even attempt to patent a natural phenomena and the USPTO let it slide. I think there is something that I am not understanding here is they are just now making laws of nature etc. un patentable. I would like to hear some feedback from the class in the comments section to discuss this.
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This is the exact issue with these rulings, they are very ambiguous and thus result in multiple court cases to more closely define it.
ReplyDeleteThis seems to build upon not being able to patent anything natural, such as the sun or wind obviously. But as Brandon said above, this is very unclear and will surely lead to loose interpretation in cases going forward. It would be nice if they could be more concrete in these rulings.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, there are still more natural phenomena in the process to be discovered. As the technologies improved overtime, it is harder to give a more concrete definition in these cases. Especially the loose interpretation like Aaron said that it's very unclear, and it definitely allows a few patents slide.
ReplyDeleteWhat's a natural phenomenon? I think we can agree that calculus is a natural phenomenon, but is Artificial Intelligence? By definition, that isn't natural, yet it is built up on various sophisticated principles in optimization, probability, and statistics.
ReplyDeleteWhat about Google's method (Pagerank) of searching through web-pages? Search engines don't seem natural to me.
Seems like we need a more rigorous definition of "natural" to proceed.