From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/4894 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Dusko Pavlovic Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: patenting colimits? Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 05:46:09 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: Reply-To: Dusko Pavlovic NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1243389531 23459 80.91.229.12 (27 May 2009 01:58:51 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 01:58:51 +0000 (UTC) To: Toby Bartels , categories@mta.ca Original-X-From: categories@mta.ca Wed May 27 03:58:48 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from mailserv.mta.ca ([138.73.1.1]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1M98Po-0004kf-2s for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Wed, 27 May 2009 03:58:48 +0200 Original-Received: from Majordom by mailserv.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.61) (envelope-from ) id 1M97mX-00044A-He for categories-list@mta.ca; Tue, 26 May 2009 22:18:13 -0300 Original-Sender: categories@mta.ca Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:4894 Archived-At: hi. On Mon, 25 May 2009, Toby Bartels wrote: > Ronnie Brown wrote: [snip] >> it seems like patenting mathematics, and to be deplored >> intensely. >> [...] > I trust that it was published in one of the cited journal articles. > > As (at least) one of the listed inventors is a reader of the list, > we might hear the other side; I'd be interested. yes, i stand guilty as accused: we patented colimits. but just the *hereditary* ones. so if you compute 1+1, you don't owe me anything. but if you compute 1+(1+0), then expect a letter from my lawyers, the same ones representing MPAA, RIAA and elsevier. but those 1s that you are computing with must be software specifications, ie in the form "spec 1 endspec", or something like that... in fact i prolly shouldn't be joking about this. patent laws are a deadly serious symptom. speaking of diseases, do you know that about 30% of human genome is patented? most of the potential cancer and parkinson disease genes are owned by a couple of companies. that means that if i want to test whether i have some cancer-related gene, i have to go to a lab that has the monopoly on testing that gene (since they rarely license to others). they will charge me a monopoly price, and if i want to test 5 genes, i may have to write to 5 different labs. if i want a second opinion about the test, whoever gives it to me may be sued. and there is no second test. the motivation for this statute is that it provides incentives for research. in contrast with the genes, mathematics cannot be patented, nor copyrighted, even according to the current crazy laws. officially and explicitly not. if you say in a patent application that you have this extremely original result, which never occurred to anyone else, and you would like to patent it --- they will reject it. the same with copyright: if you try to copyright a theorem, it will not work: anyone can cite your theorem without paying you. *but* if you write a book, and present pythagora's theorem in it, you will not only be able to copyright it, but it will actually be almost impossible for you to distribute your book without copyright it, and without selling the copyright to a publisher. so anyone who wants to use your version of pythagoras' theorem has to ask your publisher's permission. patents are crazier than copyright --- but maybe not that much crazier. you cannot patent mathematics, but you can patent "method and apparatus" for a particular application of pythagoras' theorem. (they always call it "method and apparatus".) you cannot patent modular exponentiation, nor the conjecture that inverting it (ie computing the discrete logarithms) is computationally unfeasible. but you can patent a method and apparatus to share a public key by exchanging and multiplying two modular exponents. the essence of your originality argument will rely upon the novel use of the conjecture that the discrete logarithms are hard to compute, on which the security of your system is based. what i just described is the *diffie-hellman* patent of public key cryptography. it may sound crazy to pure mathematicians, but there is very little doubt that the diffie-hellman invention changed the world of cryptography, networks, the web. our banks would work differently without diffie-hellman. (ironically, it turned out that some british civil servants working at GCHQ discovered the diffie-hellman discovery 9 years before diffie and hellman, see http://jya.com/nsam-160.htm but the UK governement classified it all, and even paid royalties for the diffie-hellman patent.) our colimits patent was, of course, not of comparable importance, although the underlying math was perhaps slightly less obvious. i'll only comment about it because toby asked. many people in software specification community (starting with goguen and burstall) thought that colimits were a good tool for composing sofware specifications. the objects of the category where you are computing the colimits are theories in some formal language, and the morphisms are the interpretations that map axioms to theorems. many people studied that approach, and a couple of tools really used it. but when you really start building software with such a tool, you find that the method hampers software reuse and evolution: a colimit composes your components by cooking them up into a big unreadable specification. so you find yourself saving the diagram of your colimit all the time, and trying to relate the content of the colimit spec with its nodes. (which ironically repeats the first lesson about the colimits: the colimit is not just the tip of the cocone, but the whole thing.) anyway, instead of computing the colimits of specs and then building new diagrams of the resulting unreadable specs to compute even more unreadable (and unmodifiable!) specs as colimits, we wanted to build a category where the objects would be diagrams of diagrams of diagrams... of specs, and the morphisms would be such that each diagram (of diagrams...) would be a colimit of itself, when externalized. that is what the requirement of a non-destructive colimit operation amounts to. what is patented is not that category, but the method to implement and use it to build and maintain software specs. we did some of implementing and using, and some of it was fun, but definitely not the shortest way to building the kind of software that needed to be built. i don't think that we published anything about this construction. the patent description was written by the lawyer (a very bright woman, i think with an MIT PhD, who now runs the world for google). some other things that we didn't publish were perhaps closer to a mathematical result. but the purpose of it all was to build software, not to publish mathematical results. we just patented it so that all those geneticists have to pay us some day, or give us some free genetic testing in exchange for hereditary diagrams ;) -- dusko [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]