At 10:55 PM 10/12/00 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
It's often hard to tell whether a physical object violates a given patent or not - bitspace is often pretty subtle stuff, especially if it's manufacturing methods rather than end results that are the subject of the patent.
But increasingly, the interesting patents are (gak) software, (gak gak) algorithms, and (gak phfft) business methods, all of which are basically bits that are potentially easy to make
untraceable.
Sure, if you actually have to ship somebody the infringing code on a CDROM or DVD, then there's some traceability, but that's decreasingly interesting as a distribution method.
Before anyone else starts, don't take my hypothesis that patents will survive in a crypto-abundant world as endorsement for the USP&TO lunacy we've all seen. You can limit the context to physical-object or manufacturing patents. It is has been pretty well argued that bits will be very hard to regulate in any sense of that word; and also that USPTO has been doing too much PCP during work hours.