Ronald Greenberg <rig@eng.umd.edu> (05/24/91)
With regard to the question of what should and shouldn't be patentable,
people may be interested in the {Technology Review} article "The
Software Patent Crisis" by Brian Kahin, pages 52-58 in the April 1990
issue.
The table of contents synopsis reads as follows:
"The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is awarding exclusive rights to
thousands of programming processes ranging from machine instructions
to features of the user interface. The independent software
entrepreneur may all but disappear and the viatality of the industry
is at stake -- as is the future of computer-mediated expression."
Apparently, the Patent Office has gotten much more liberal about
awarding software patents lately. One point in the article that I
find disturbing in conjunction with this is the following:
"Many programmers suspect that patent examiners lack knowledge of the
field, especially since the Patent Office does not accept computer
science as a qualifying degree for patent practice (it accepts degrees
in electrical engineering)."
Ronald I. Greenberg rig@eng.umd.edu