Re: math patents

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

At 09:08 AM 4/14/96 -0800, Lee Tien wrote:
>In reply to the message excerpted below:
>
>I believe Jim's not looked back far enough.  My recollection from law
>school is that the law was friendly to math patents in the period before
>the Supreme Court weighed in.  There were some PTO denials, which courts
>reversed (I think the Court of Claims heard these back then).  So I think
>the trend was toward patenting processes even if mathematical until
>Gottschalk v. Benson.  It's a conceptually messy area because "processes"
>have long been patentable (like the Morse telegraphy/Bell telephony
>patents) but the Supreme Court saw the Benson application as violating the
>doctrine against patenting "laws of nature."  
>
>Lee

I seem to recall reading that one of the breakthrough "algorithm" patents 
was from the 1970's, in which a rubber-curing/molding process's cure time 
was determined by a mathematical formula based on heat, pressure, mold 
shape, and a number of other variables.   I don't really object to 
this, because some engineering tasks are complicated and mathematical 
formulas are required to solve them optimally.  However, I  don't see the 
basis for patenting what is just about pure mathematics, and RSA is very 
close to pure math.  The fact that there is a practical use for it is almost 
a secondary consideration.   

If factoring numbers were easy, RSA wouldn't have been useful, even though 
the math would still have "existed," at least theoretically.  Clearly, it is 
not the math itself which is useful; it is a specific characteristic of that 
math, its difficult reversibility.  A person looking for a mathematical 
algorithm to apply to public-key cryptography probably doesn't try to do new 
math; what he tries to do is to find old math that has this characteristic.  
Had mathematics always been patentable, the patent on that math would have 
expired at least decades, and possibly centuries ago.

In any case, I don't think it's unrealistic to suspect that the government 
was playing games with the patent system due to RSA.  After all, let's get 
back to basics:  What, exactly, does a patent do?  A patent on RSA doesn't 
prevent the EVIL SOVIETS from using it.  It doesn't "allow" the USG to use 
it; if there was no patent on it they'd be able to use it for free.  The 
only thing a patent on RSA might arguably do is to keep other people, mostly 
Americans, from using it.  That's right, the patent system was actuallly 
denying the public this system.