HP Patents Bignum Implementation From 1912 144
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The authors of GMP (the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library) were invited to join Peer-to-Patent to review HP's recent patent on a very old technique for implementing bignums because their software might infringe. Basically, HP's patent claims choosing an exponent based on processor word size. If you choose a 4-bit word size and a binary number, you end up working in hexadecimal. Or for a computer with a 16-bit word and a base-10 number, you use base 10,000 so that each digit of the base-10,000 number would fit into a single 16-bit word. The obvious problem with that is that there's plenty of prior art here. Someone who spent a few minutes Googling found that Knuth describing the idea in TAOCP Vol. 2 and other citations go back to 1912 (which implemented the same algorithm using strips of cardboard and a calculating machine). None of this can be found in the 'references cited' section. Even though the patent examiner did add a couple of references, they appear to have cited some old patents. The patent issued a few months ago was filed back in October of 2004, and collected dust at the USPTO for some 834 days."
Re:What I want to know is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sanity has never been part of the US patent process. Here's some pre-computer examples.
1. An inventor was able to patent a design for mule shaped bookends, while another was denied a patent on a mule shaped balloon. The Patent Office ruled that sawing a brass mule in half was non-obvious and original, while blowing up a rubber mule wasn't. In a similar area, dying coal blue wasn't novel, but dying coal blue with your company logo was.
2. Aspirin was patented well after a similar process for making Salicylic Acid on an industrial scale was. The office decided, with no precidents, that making the same chemical in pure enough form that it was safe for medicinal use was novel. When challenged on it, the USPO said they were going through a bottle a day deciding patent claims and were not about to reject rewarding this claim no matter what the law said.
3. A patent was once denied on a chemical process because that chemical was already mentioned in industry literature from more than a year before. The problem? What the literature said was: "It is impossible to synthesize chemical X. No one will ever do it."
Re:What I want to know is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Patents are for the most part completely useless. We should just get rid of the entire patent process. It's not needed.
Re:PostgreSQL did this ten years ago (Score:1, Interesting)
Yep, obvious though - or at least I think so having done something similar in the 90s just as 64 bit machines were becoming commonplace. I didn't think it was particularly clever at the time and didn't pat myself on the back. I certainly didn't think it was worth a patent - although, I must admit, when the plea "Developers, find stuff that we can patent and we will give you $2K for each patent - no matter how inane" goes out I pretend to be a drooling idiot with no ideas (there's no way $2K or $20K is worth dealing with patent attorneys and reading drafts of patents - even if tricking the USPTO to grant patents that shouldn't be seemed ethical to me).
Re:I did the same thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What I want to know is... (Score:3, Interesting)