Vera, in theory, the patent examiner is a trained engineer who will not approve faster-than-light travel, perpetual motion, and other impossibilities.  However, your point remains valid.  In 1880, the USPTO no longer required an actual working device to grant a patent.  They have granted patents on plans for 134 years.  Maybe a plan should get some kind of intellectual property (IP) protection.  As in an academic publication, you get credit for the idea.  It ends there.  But then what happens when someone actually builds this "impossible" thing? What rights are owned by whom?  

Over on the "Galt's Gulch" website Objectivist patent attorney Dale Halling (dhalling) argues well for granting the high ground to current US patent law.  (He allows some exceptions.  For instance, US patent law just went over to "first to file" from "first to invent."  Until just 2013, in the US filing first you might slip in a patent application, but it could be successfully challenged by someone who proved that they invented it first.  That is no longer true.  The US joined the rest of the world in granting rights to the first to file. dhalling objects to that.  

(Note also that his wife khalling also posts what are essentially his opinions.)

They do not like the fact that the Uniform Commerical Code "forced" software to be licensed.  I think otherwise on that. I like the UCC and I like the fact that software is admittedly garbage no one could possibly sell to anyone with two fingers of forehead.  "Merchantability" is the issue.  Sofware licenses make no promise of merchantabilty or fitness of use.  In other words, "we don't promise that anyone else will want this; we don't even promise that this will work."  And yet we are enjoying an informatic revolution.

Dear Ms. Vera S. Doerr,

If someone displayed the ignorance in criticizing Objectivism that this article does about patent law, Objectivists would be furious.  First of all it is clear that you do not know how to read a patent.  You don’t know the difference between the claims and the background, you don’t know the difference between an independent claim and a dependent claim or a patent and a patent application.  In fact it is clear that you did not read the patent application, which can be found here http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20140215201.pdf.  If you had read the patent application and understood how patents are written, instead of the summary from the article, you would clearly have seen that the invention is not about a device which can turn into a “cell phone, a smartphone, a tablet PC, a laptop, a personal computer, a netbook, a personal digital assistant, an e-book reader, a TV and/or other computing devices...”  You would have seen that this was about a device with a foldable display that takes certain action when it is folded in different ways.  These actions are explained in the patent application as making or receiving a phone call, sending or receiving an electronic document, activating or deactivating a software program, and connecting to or disconnecting from a network.

Despite your ignorance of patent law, electronics technology, and the specifics of the invention, you pontificate that “the technology behind it (the invention) would be so diverse that no material, no hardware, no software, existing today even as a theoretical prototype, could be combined into such a device.” Perhaps you are unaware that one of the requirements of a patent is the enablement requirement under 35 USC 112.  It requires that the inventor explain his invention in enough detail that one skilled in the art be able to practice the invention.  But you don’t have to take my word for it, foldable displays are known, see displays http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/05/samsung-ceo-folding-screens-by-2015/.  Having a foldable display that when folded in a certain way receives a phone call, or sends a document, is well within the reach of today’s technology.  As a patent attorney, with a BS in electrical engineering, a MS in physics, and named inventor on nine patents, I can assure you that this patent application is enabled and could easily be built by one skilled in the art.  Now that I have shown that to you, you will probably turn around and say it should not be patented because it is obvious, further proving your ignorance of patent law, logic, and reason.

Next you state that everyone is doing this and you “simply cannot believe this patent scam! Worse: it's actually legal!”  This is clearly an appeal to emotion not logic.  You continue this unsubstantiated attack on the patent system, suggesting it is a legal hold up game that people are using to get rich.  Your article is worthy of a muckraking SOCIALIST journalist or a follower of Kant, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, but not someone writing on the Rebirth of Reason http://rebirthofreason.com/Spirit/News/3190.shtml or someone who has studied Ayn Rand.

Rand stated that Patents and Copyrights are the source of all property rights, because they protect the source of all human creation, the products of man’s mind.  Patents are property rights for inventions and your attack on the patent system is really an attack on the very basis of property rights.

There is a SCAM going on here Ms. Doerr, but it is not patents.

Sincerely,

Dale B. Halling

Vera, first, let me say that I noted Dale Halling's argument from intimidation. As Barbara Branden pointed out, Ayn Rand had in her time an amazing abllity to connect other people's conclusions with their unstated premises.  "You accept Kant..." etc. Her admirers imitate that: "I disagree with you, therefore you endorse Kirkegaard's existentialism; and you are a socialist."

For the rest, I assumed the use of hinges on the device and I could imagine its creation: lock a hinge into place and contacts bring up different functions.  But I was not interested in that. I was intrigued by your challenge.  As I indicated with cold fusion and hydrinos, it is easy to see that a truly radical invention would be declared unpatentable, as if it were perpetual motion.  Galt's motor comes to mind, easily.

You hold the false belief that patents are for scientific discoveries. That is not true.  Although the US Constitution plainly says (Art I Section 8. Often called the "Enumerated Powers"):  "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"  realize that the word "scientist" was coined in 1833 by William Whewell.  In other words the Constitution was ahead of its time (as in other areas) and the framers did not have our modern idea of science.  In fact, patents have been for incremental technical improvements, not for bold new ideas.

Dale Halling's point - and mine in my first reply - is that patent examiners look to explainable (explicable) descriptions that they can understand based on current engineering and technology.  Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, Samuel Morse's telegraph, and the electronic computer were all examples of that.  

More subtly, it is only in our time (about 1850 to present) that science as theory actually informed technology as application.  For thousands of years, technical improvements came without firm scientific understanding: we know an electrical battery from ancient Bagdhad (250 BCE to 250 CE). Temples in ancient Alexandria c. 100 CE had "miracles" run by hydraulic and pneumatic actuators. In our time statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics have informed the inventors of steam engines and computer chips.

That being as it is, patents always make extravagent claims.  They want to claim everything they thought of and anything they did not but should have. That is formulaic.

Myself, I have a problem with much in US patent law. I believe that we need intellectual property rights, property rights for ideas.  I am not convinced that we have a rational basis for that or an objective body of such laws.  I earn income from my writing.  Of course I protect my property.  But I am not irrationally protective, like a spouse who wants to punch out any man who smiles at his wife. 

Right, Luke.  Penrose Tiles and Trapdoor Ciphers … and the Return of Dr. Matrix by Martin Gardner (Washington DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1989) the first essay is about Penrose Tiles, a mathematical nicety that was granted a patent because it was presented as a way to lay decorative floor tiles.  

It is claimed often that a computer program is not a mathematical idea, but is in fact a set of gates and switches, i.e., a hardware device. That would make every computer program running on every make and model of computer a different patentable machine.  

Moreover, a computer program no matter how complex is just ONE number.  When we present a command line view of a program like this 

10110100 00101100 11001101 00100001 10110000 01000110 11111110 11101110 00001010 00100000 00000001 10001001 11000010 10110100 00001001 11001101 00100001 11001101 00100000

The spaces are for our convenience.  To the computer it is just 

1011010000101100110011010010000110110000 etc., with the processor programmed to take each set of 8 or 16 or 64 etc.  This goes back to Alan Turing's paper strip reader.  As George Dyson pointed out in Turing's Cathedral, previously, operations were performed on numbers, but Turing made numbers into operations.  Thus, despite what they claim, the USPTO does indeed grant patents to numbers with every patent on software.

Patent law is a non-objective mess.

Vera, you opened several avenues of discussion. I found it difficult to discuss these problems with Dale Halling. He defended current US patent law without reservation.  He calls names, charging other long-time active participants on the Galt's Gulch site with being socialists when they disagree with him.  I pointed out the change in US patent law from "first to invent" to "first to file."  He acknowledged that and said that he also found it unjust.  But I had to bring it up.  He never crticizes US law.  I think that it is because he does not want to prejudice the courts against himself and his clients. I believe that we need intellectual property rights that are defended by law, but I see many problems with US law.  I have been trying to work this through from first principles.  But at every turn he just calls me names and points to the Constitution.  

As for 'Galt's motor': that has the added disadvantage that there's no theoretical explanation yet how the actual conversion of static electricity could work in a physically buildable machine (as far as I know - please correct me if I'm wrong). Just theorizing that it is possible, but not having the first clues how to actually implement it, is in my opinion not enough to ...

 

I believe based on what Dale Halling provided that John Galt could not get a patent on his engine specifically because it depends on a new theory of energy that he would have to explain to people who could understand it.  I once saw an old news reel where Thomas Edison was asked about relativity and he said that he did not understand it. Would a patent examiner (a lawyer trained in engineering), understand Galt's Theory?

The mistake that Martin Fleischman and Stanley Pons made was actually building the device and letting other people reproduce their results.  They should have applied for a patent and not built it.  I believe that they could not do that because their theory was too radical.  (And, apparently, it was wrong.)  But you see the point. Here on RoR, Luke Setzer, a NASA engineer, has been touting Randell L. Mills's hydrino theory. Mills asserts that this is just classical quantum mechanics. However, the patent office reversed itself and revoked a patent after Robert L. Park wrote an article against it.  (Wikipedia here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackLight_Power).  Patent here: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=6024935&KC=&FT=E&locale=en_EP and here: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=6024935&KC=&FT=E&locale=en_EP

(As an aside -- Park is popular (not famous) for attacking what he calls junk science.  I had a class in "Ethics in Physics" in 2010 when I was completing my master's and we read his book, Voodoo science: the road from foolishness to fraud; Oxford University Press, 2002. Park includes manned space flight as an example of junk science, by the way: he calls it unnecessary, dangerous, and unproductive.)

Anyway, perhaps Galt's Motor might be patented; and a working model would be a convincing argument. (The law did require working models at first, but that was abandoned in 1880.)  If Professor Park had not blown the whistle, the USPTO would not have re-examined the patent.  But that also does not speak well for the patent office. It validates your worries about patent scams. Obviously, anyone can get a patent on an impossible dream.

 

But again that's just my old-fashioned idea which ideas and which inventions should be protected by patents - and why I get so frustrated that they are pushing patent-law (even the sane parts of it) to it's limits where it turns against genuine inventors and becomes a money-printing excuse for lesser minds.

 

Although the word "science" appeared in the US Constitution, the word "scientist" was 40 years in their future.  It is a principle that scientific laws cannot be patented.  They exist to be discovered. They are not invented.  I believe that the patent office might serve better by operating like the copyright office. They do not judge the quality of a work, only register its creation.  So, too, with the patents, let any and everything be patented, but without monopoly rights as the default.

I propose:

• To gain the monopoly, you would actually have to build the device you are claiming.
• However, the monopoly would be  specific to the device as built.  Anyone who improved it would have their own monopoly patent on that work.I

My theory is that ideas are non-rival and non-exclusive.  Someone else knowing what you know does not prevent your ownership. Any number of people can know the same thing at the same time.  You would be perfectly free to keep your knowledge and methods secret, of course.  The formula for Coca-Cola is perhaps the most famous example of that.  But if someone successfully reverse engineers Coke, that is their tough luck.

Vera, we seem to be on the same page.  As I said, I am thinking this through from first principles.  I will have an article later.  I am now working on a submission to the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies about a different problem.  

 

MM:  The mistake that Martin Fleischman and Stanley Pons made was actually building the device and letting other people reproduce their results.  They should have applied for a patent and not built it.  I believe that they could not do that because their theory was too radical.  (And, apparently, it was wrong.)

VD:  I don't know the particulars of this case, but if it's that obvious where the device comes from and the patent is still granted to someone else, or applying for a patent after building it and other's already reproducing it, and the patent is denied, then I don't want anything to do with patent law.

 

Fleischman and Pon were famous for Cold Fusion.  It was a news event that you should know about, or find out about if you do not know it.  It was a classic failure.  One of my interests is aviation - I learned to fly - and here in the States, it is also a classic failure that with $100,000 of government money, Smithsonian curator Samuel Langley put two planes in the Potomac River attempting to fly.  (He was not the pilot, of course.)  The Wright Brothers spent $14,000 of their own money being successful.  Cold Fusion was a university research project.  

That is why Fleischman and Pons demonstrated their results for others to replicate. I believe that they had the right idea in seizing the fame first and getting the fortune later.  They failed.  Their theory and practice were wrong and other researchers could not replicate their results. 

My point - and you have agreed more than once - is that if they had not actually built the thing, but only claimed a workable theory, they could have gotten a patent apparently.  That is another condemnation of current US patent law.  I believe that you need an actual working device.

However, think about a chemical processing plant.

Es ist ein Bissel schwer solch ein Ding in einem Kasten zu stellen.  (It's kind of hard to put a thing like that in a box, i.e., to show the patent examiners that it actually works.)

Michael:

Patent law is for sure a mess.   It is a domain mostly for businesses in the business of lawyering.

"Thus, despite what they claim, the USPTO does indeed grant patents to numbers with every patent on software."

This is true in the same sense that the museums of the world are filled with paint and marble and plaster, that Oscars are awarded on the basis of sinusoidal disturbances travelling on two orthogonal planes, E and H, that London Philharmonic commerces in pressure disturbances, and that every book or story or script ever written in English today is made up of just 26 letters(which, if we were to represent as ascii or some other code, after all, are just 010011101010100010010101101010011110101....

Through pure monkeys at a keyboard chance, how long would it have taken Dan Bricklin to guess the number that is a functioning VisiCalc?'

Likewise, if I were to throw paint at a canvas, how long before the Mona Lisa is a result?

The media is seldom as interesting as the local entropy decreasing ordering of the media.

regards,

Fred

Wow - I have to be very careful what I write here: click

I was looking for some old postings of mine in an old objectivist group and the search engine returned the above link to Mr. Halling's blog tagged directly to my name (plus several other tags).

Apart from the personal attacks he never bothered to answer (not to mention some pertinent points to patent law), I find it very intimidating that my unwise words in a (semi-)public venue are now a 'Rebirth of Reason Website Attacks Patents'. I think Joe would ban me, delete my posts and request a deletion of every mention of my name in regard to RoR from all search engines if RoR were actually attacking patents :D

I've taken the liberty to invite Mr. Halling (again) to reply to the serious points raised here (hopefully my comment will appear on above blog). He can of course skip the unimportant personal attacks if he wishes to. At the very least he could explain/rephrase the title of his blog, if he does not want to be accused of the same inaccuracies, rant, slander, he's been accusing me of.

Unless of course he's just claiming attention for his blog by exaggerated headlines - this is after all a 'media scam', right ;)

Now if that does not get his attention nothing will ;)

VSD

Vera:

Here is a better thought:  Happy Holidays!

regards,

Fred

I'll top you one Fred:

"unknown and unimaginable form or non-form of existence or non-existence attacks or does not attack something or other including and/or excluding the known or imaginable" :D

enjoy your holidays - for me it's just unpaid working days (book keeping, insurance updates, taxes, registrations, etc.) ... ah well: such is human life - at least as an atheist I get a headstart ;)

VSD

PS: pity I did not find those old groups (about 15 years ago) - wanted to check if my defeatist view of homo sapiens sapiens was already present at those times or is a part of my growing older, wiser, more experienced and definitely more calcified in the synapses ;)