Patent office issues final rejection of NTP patent

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The Issue Exposed

This particular case exemplifies what I would consider to be one of the most critical issues in patent law that there is. Considering that the primary purpose of patent law is supposed to provide pecuniary incentive to inventors to encourage the invention of new devices, compounds and processes, a prerequisite for getting a patent is the invention in question must be unique enough to not be a creation of an ?obvious? nature. This is central to most of the issues in getting a patent as even the question of ?prior existing art? harkens back to the central theme of being non obvious.
In relation to computer software there is always a question as to the obvious or non obvious nature of the particular program in question. There are few other areas where something can be developed that has no current useful purpose although future developments may in fact have some significant use for the very program invented. This clearly creates a situation where a program with no current application seems particularly unique and unobvious, but still may in fact be very obvious to anyone who felt there may be a need to sit down and write the code for the software.
The purpose of patent law is not to set up a race to the patent law office where the first come is the first served and then holds the lucky lottery ticket to future prospective winnings. It is supposed to encourage the development of truly unique inventions where they must pass the test of a true inventor.
To the extent that the skill and ingenuity could not have been obvious to a person skilled in the art at the date of the invention, the test is met. Now here with RIM we are seeing a case where not only did NTP develop such a program, RIM developed such a program and apparently so did at least on more program come into existence in Europe, being the first evidently. Unless I am out of touch in how things work in the world, to have at least these 3 develop such software doing the same thing the same way suggest to me that it was quite obvious to anyone trained in the art who chose to put their mind to the task.
Until the individuals at the patent office have the competence to evaluate a computer program on the true unique originality it may or may not have, they have no business giving patents on software or anything they cannot competently evaluate its true degree of inventiveness.

Posted by: Cayble   Posted on: 02/22/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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