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The Future of IP Software, with Carl Hewitt

By Pamela Jones et al.

I think you guys will want to see this extraordinarily interesting talk by Carl Hewitt on YouTube. He talks about the future of IP software -- future as in when computers start filing patent applications. "If there is no principled way to distinguish computation from human thinking" -- then what? Human thinking isn't patentable. And if the meaning is a mathematical denotation, and mathematics is also unpatentable, what happens when computers are filing thousands and thousands of patent applications on all the patentable IP in the universe?

A subtheme is that Mark Lemley, who thinks software patents are acceptable as long as we tweak the USPTO process to screen out claiming the function instead of the way to get to the goal, is suggesting a halfway measure, because the future for the US patent system is a patent quagmire, because of the future capabilities of computers to overwhelm the USPTO with patent applications, none of which should be patentable but which under the current regime would be.

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 13, 2013 (boomark / email).