Re: patenting colimits?

[Toby Bartels <toby+categories@ugcs.caltech.edu>]

Dusko Pavlovic wrote in part:

>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.

It's a shame if there were new mathematical results
(perhaps, pace Steve Vickers's post, there weren't)
that were published only in a patent application.
Maybe they were too obvious to be worthy of publication,
but then weren't they too obvious to be worthy of a patent?

Of course, you were presumably doing work for hire,
and I'm not trying to blame you for all of this,
but I'm happy when people get outraged about these practices.

While I'm here, some clarifications are my previous posts:
When I first wrote "I'm not sure that it's anything new",
I didn't mean the novelty of the invention in the patent
but instead the practice of patenting such things.
And when I wrote "I would not wanted to be hobbled
by a patent on the relevant mathematics", of course I meant
a patent on implementing the relevant mathematics in software.


--Toby


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