Re: patenting colimits?

[Dusko Pavlovic <Dusko.Pavlovic@comlab.ox.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 27 May 2009, Toby Bartels wrote:
>> 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.

is publishing really the supreme purpose of mathematical results? it is
the main method to get an academic job, but academia itself is not a
purpose of itself.

mathematics and sciences are a good thing in at least two ways:

1) as a form of communication (collaboration) between people, and

2) as a source of benefits (better life, useful technologies)

the imperative of publishing evolved as a part of (1). are the current
publishing practices still serving their original purpose, to help
collaboration? or did we put the cart in front of the horse? does the
publishing scrutiny really improve sciences? (search, web, internet all
arose from largely unpublished results. some great ideas of category
theory did not hurry to get published. and the other way around...)

patenting evolved as a part of (2). it also deviated from its original
purpose, and now mostly hampers social benefits...

can such problems be solved on moral grounds, by saying "patenting is bad,
i won't patent"? some people think it can. both grothendieck and newton
said "publishing is bad, i won't publish". and did anything change? i
somehow don't think that it would change if i joined them.

better methods to solve these problems are sought than abstinence and
moralizing.

re
> It's a shame if there were new mathematical results
> (perhaps, pace Steve Vickers's post, there weren't)

i didn't think that they were research level mathematical results. so i am
impressed that steve vickers enumerates so many publications about them.

in any case, even our tool implementing these results predates the
publications that steve vickers mentions.

> Maybe they were too obvious to be worthy of publication,
> but then weren't they too obvious to be worthy of a patent?

you seem to have missed the main point of my previous post.

i described one of the most important patents in computing: the diffie
hellman key exchange. its mathematical content boils down to the
conjecture that discrete logarithms are computationally hard. this
mathematical content has been obvious to nearly anyone who tried to
compute discrete logarithms.

the point is that

** the novelty of a patent is not in the underlying math. (by law,
mathematics cannot be patented.)

** the novelty of a patent is in the "method and apparatus" extracted from
it. (the intent of a patent is not to protect knowledge, but an
application, a new way to use it.)

(gotta run)

-- dusko


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