In addition to identifying the functionality malfunction in the software arts, this Article evaluates the merits of the most promising way of fixing it.
The Federal Circuit has dropped the ball, so the argument goes, in that it has failed to employ patent law's well-developed tools for curtailing permissible patent scope in the software arts. (2) Given this explanation of the problem, the solution seems self-evident and eminently achievable: the Federal Circuit must simply step up and use the tools that are already at its disposal to curb the scope of software patents.
AN UNPREDICTABILITY DOCTRINE FOR THE SOFTWARE ARTS?
unpredictability in the software arts. All of software should not be
The contributors to this collection are part of the software culture, where they not only work as programmers, designers and master users but also as theorists in digital society, as evidenced by this collection of work from the August 2004
Software Arts and Cultures conference held at the University of Aarbus.
and was instrumental in the development of Lotus Symphony and
Software Arts' TK!Solver and VisiCalc.
Had Digital Research, VisiCorp and
Software Arts asserted intellectual property rights as aggressively as Microsoft and Lotus, they might not have been eclipsed by them.
The claims are directed to a specific implementation of a solution to a problem in the
software arts." The Federal Circuit contrasted this against patent claims it had invalidated in the past, writing, "[W]e are not faced with a situation where general-purpose computer components are added post-hoc to a fundamental economic practice or mathematical equation."
(198) The ontology of invention is thus reversed in the
software arts. In most arts, an invention "is" its structure, not its function.