Re: patenting colimits?

Re: patenting colimits?

[Dusko Pavlovic]

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arose from largely unpublished results.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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Re: patenting colimits?

[Dusko Pavlovic]

thanks. our tools can be just as freely downloaded, eg
http://www.kestrel.edu/home/projects/pda/

-- dusko

On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Till Mossakowski wrote:

> Dusko,
>
> let me just notice that we are maintaining a *free software* tool
> that actually is built upon categorical ideas (using Goguen's
> and Burstall's institutions) and that computes colimits
> (there is a menu Edit -> Proofs -> Compute Colimit
>
> http://www.dfki.de/sks/hets
>
> It is published under a free license, so you can freely download
> the binaries, the source, modify the source, and republish your
> improvements under the license.
>
> Best,
> Till

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Re: patenting colimits?

[Till Mossakowski]

Dusko,

let me just notice that we are maintaining a *free software* tool
that actually is built upon categorical ideas (using Goguen's
and Burstall's institutions) and that computes colimits
(there is a menu Edit -> Proofs -> Compute Colimit

http://www.dfki.de/sks/hets

It is published under a free license, so you can freely download
the binaries, the source, modify the source, and republish your
improvements under the license.

Best,
Till


Dusko Pavlovic schrieb:
> [sorry, i just noticed this]
>
> On May 26, 2009, at 8:29 PM, Zinovy Diskin wrote:
>
>> impressive examples, such as the extremely successful Eclipse project
>> http://www.eclipse.org, (btw, Eclipse is partly based on categorical
>> ideas that engineers developed/reinvented from scratch).
>
> i designed two tools which people who built them built on top of
> eclipse, and i must admint that i managed to completely miss those
> categorical ideas. eclipse is very handy, but some simple class
> hierarchies often become unrecognizable in its straitjacket. i am
> probably not the only one who would be curious to learn more about
> category theory behind eclipse :)
>

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Re: patenting colimits?

[Zinovy Diskin]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Dusko Pavlovic <dusko@kestrel.edu> wrote:

> i designed two tools which people who built them built on top of eclipse,
> and i must admint that i managed to completely miss those categorical ideas.
> eclipse is very handy, but some simple class hierarchies often become
> unrecognizable in its straitjacket. i am probably not the only one who would
> be curious to learn more about category theory behind eclipse :)
>

well, I've overstated it a little bit because of the context. What I
actually meant was Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) --  one of the
several top-level projects constituting Eclipse.

The core idea of EMF is that a majority of complex structures called
models can be presented as lax functors m: EC  --> mRel, where EC is
the category freely generated by some graph EM called the Ecore
metamodel, and mRel is bicategory of finite sets and finite
multirelations (spans) between them. However, not every such functor
is a valid model because the metamodel EM is actually a sketch, EC is
the theory generated by EM and m should be a functor preserving the
structure (using Makkai's rather than classical sketches is much more
technically convenient here).

Models are used for code generation, and code is just another model.
For example, a Java program is a morphism p: JC-->mRel with JC being
the theory generated by the Java metamodel sketch JM. So, code
generation would be a case of the  change of base situation if we had
a theory morphism e2j: JC-->EC (generated by a Kleilsi arrow JM-->EC).
The real situation is much more complicated because e2j is a span EC
<-- o --> JC rather than a functor.

This is a rough picture. Metamodels and models appearing in practice
are big, and therefore are designed and stored in fragments called
packages. Gathering them together (virtually via the so called package
merge)  is an operation based on taking colimits of the diagram
specifying package relationships. Code generation/change of base in
the presence of packages gives rise to sheaves. And so on.

Of course I did  not mean that Eclipse developers explicitly used
categorical ideas. Relations between software systems like Eclipse and
cat. theory are like relations between physical phenomena and their
mathematical models.

Z.



>> Another
>> example is the use of open source software for commercial products by
>> such giants as IBM.
>
> i hope that you are right that it is a good thing that IBM supports the open
> source. i also hope that it is a good thing that Exxon, Chevron and BP
> support the alternative sources of energy, and that Philip Morris supports
> the teen culture.
>
> -- dusko
>

although a part of Eclipse but an important one. Here is what the EMF
Book [1] says (pages 4-5):
<<
The development work in Eclipse is divided into several top-level
projects, including the Eclipse Project, the Modeling Project, the
Tool Project, and the Technology project.
....
The Eclipse Modeling Project is the focal point for the evolution and
promotion of model-based development technologies at Eclipse. At its
core is EMF, which provides the basic framework for modeling. Other
modeling sub-projects build on top of the EMF core, providing such
capabilities as model transformation, database integration, and
graphical editor generation...


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Re: patenting colimits?

[Dusko Pavlovic]

[sorry, i just noticed this]

On May 26, 2009, at 8:29 PM, Zinovy Diskin wrote:

> impressive examples, such as the extremely successful Eclipse project
> http://www.eclipse.org, (btw, Eclipse is partly based on categorical
> ideas that engineers developed/reinvented from scratch).

i designed two tools which people who built them built on top of
eclipse, and i must admint that i managed to completely miss those
categorical ideas. eclipse is very handy, but some simple class
hierarchies often become unrecognizable in its straitjacket. i am
probably not the only one who would be curious to learn more about
category theory behind eclipse :)

> Another
> example is the use of open source software for commercial products by
> such giants as IBM.

i hope that you are right that it is a good thing that IBM supports
the open source. i also hope that it is a good thing that Exxon,
Chevron and BP support the alternative sources of energy, and that
Philip Morris supports the teen culture.

-- dusko


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Re: patenting colimits?

[Toby Bartels]

David Espinosa wrote in part:

>We seem to be more excited about patents than categories!  I guess opinions
>are cheaper than theorems...

Of course; it's a matter of convenience, not excitement.

>I'd say that citation is the academic form of currency.  Here's a
>dictionary:

>Academia: Academics get quite upset if you use their ideas without citing
>them.
>Industry: Companies sue you if you use their patents without paying them.

>Academia: You can publish improvements to someone's basic idea.
>Industry: You can patent improvements to someone's basic idea.

Here's what you missed:
Academia: Academics can freely use ideas if they cite them,
 and nobody minds if they come up with idea independently.
Industry: Companies must pay to use patented ideas,
 even if they come up with the idea indpendently,
 at whatever rate (possibly prohibitive) set by the owner of the patent.


--Toby


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Re: patenting colimits?

[Uwe.Wolter]

Quoting Steve Vickers <s.j.vickers@cs.bham.ac.uk>:

> Toby Bartels wrote:
>> ...
>> Certainly much of what is in the patent application is obvious,
>> but perhaps not all of it; were these diagrams of diagrams a new idea?,
>> or was applying them to computer system specifications a new idea?.
>> ...
>
> Dear Toby,
>
> The idea of treating specifications as colimits is a few decades old
> now. Burstall and Goguen used it in their categorical account of their
> specification language Clear, with a specification used to construct a
> new theory as colimit of others.

Yes, Steve! And they coined also the idea of so-called "based objects"
that allow to distinguish between parameter specifications and
imported specifications once you are going to develop a fully fledged
theory of parametrized specifications. Ingo Classen worked out this in
more detail in his PhD thesis around 1995 (?) at Technical University
Berlin.

Best regards

Uwe Wolter


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Re: patenting colimits?

[David Espinosa]

We seem to be more excited about patents than categories!  I guess opinions
are cheaper than theorems...

I'd say that citation is the academic form of currency.  Here's a
dictionary:

Academia: Academics rush to publish before their colleagues.
Industry: Companies rush to patent before their competition.

Academia: Academics get quite upset if you use their ideas without citing
them.
Industry: Companies sue you if you use their patents without paying them.

Academia: A generous academic lets you publish his idea (yeah, right).
Industry: A generous businessman lets you profit from his idea (yeah,
right).

Academia: You can publish improvements to someone's basic idea.
Industry: You can patent improvements to someone's basic idea.

So you can see why I find the academic "high horse" attitude towards patents
a bit hypocritical.

BTW, here's a difference between academia and industry, which comes about
because money is more flexible than time:

Academia: An academic *cannot* give you any credit for his existing
publication.
Industry: A company *can* let you profit from its existing patent.

David




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Re: patenting colimits?

[Toby Bartels]

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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Re: patenting colimits?

[Toby Bartels]

zoran skoda wrote in part:

>But in american law it is theoretically possible that in times when there
>was not  a single nuclear submarine, one registers a patent
>for the idea/concept nuclear submarine without
>any specific techincal details on construction.

This is a good example, since if you read Feynman's account
of how he didn't get the patent for that (but did for other things),
you can see how the ideas that he got patents for really *were*
"obvious at the time the invention was made to a person
having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains"
(to quote current law, which may have been different in 1945).
But of course, the patent office had no way of knowing that.

Here's an abbreviated account:
http://ipho2008.hnue.edu.vn/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=uwXCnR4Vj4E%3D&tabid=97&mid=723


--Toby


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Re: patenting colimits?

[mjhealy]

Dear Michael and all,

I am unaware of a great deal of the history of category theory in grant
funding.  The NSF declaration is troubling, especially since my colleagues
and I so far have had our category-theoretic proposals in cognitive
neuroscience rejected.  Some of the reviewers, though, did seem to find
favor with our use of category theory in relation to their subject; the
problem seems to have been more in other areas.  We haven't given up!

I regret not joining the FMCS crowd at UBC.  Too much work has resulted
from a prior commitment.

Best regards,
Mike

> Interesting comments by Vaughan.  I have not looked at this patent and
> have no intention of doing so.  But Charles and I, both in CTCS and in a
> paper published in some CS conference proceedings exhibited things like
> a sketch for trees of integers as a pushout or amalgamated sum of a sketch
> for trees and that for integers by identifying the sort for integers in
> the latter with the sort for leaves in the fomer.  I think we have a
> triple amalgamation too, something like trees of lists of integers.  So
> evidence of prior art certainly exists, if anyone cares.
>
> On the other hand, I for one would welcome serious applications of
> category theory in industry.  My former department is hiring in only three
> areas: number theory (in which they are truly strong), applied math, and
> statistics (in each of which I rather suspect they are truly weak since
> they are competing with every g-d university in North America).  I would
> just love to shove it in their collective faces that by allowing the
> category theory group to wither, they have allowed an important applied
> area to disappear.  But no, they would rather be in the rearguard than the
> advanced guard.
>
> Wouldn't it be nice to make the same point to NSF which announced
> officially in 1993 that there would never again be any funding in category
> theory?
>
> Michael
>
>
> [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]
>




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Re: patenting colimits?

[David CHEMOUIL]

On Tue, 26 May 2009 19:53:32 -0700, David Spivak <dspivak@gmail.com> wrote:
> One reason a mathematician may want to patent a practical use of his idea is
> because if he doesn't do so, someone else can.  If some corporation spent
> the money to understand a mathematical construction and then patented its
> application, not only does that corporation stand to make a lot of money (on
> a construction the corporation was hardly involved with), it can also keep
> competitors from using the ideas.  Or, the corporation can "bury it," by
> patenting the ideas and then not using them, but still using litigation to
> prevent others from putting the ideas to good use.

First, patent laws are national laws. But it is generally acknowledged, even
in the most patent-friendly countries, that a patent should protect something
*original*. As long as you have published your idea with a clearly
identifiable date of publication, for instance in a scientific journal, no
one should be able to patent it afterwards (I write "should" because patent
offices are often a bit skimpy).

Secondly, and once again, many countries do not allow patenting mathematical
results. Things are less clear for algorithms.

> Once you patent, you control the rights to the intellectual property, and
> can make the product more or less widely available.  To me, the patenting of
> an application of category theory is not an issue; the problem would be if
> someone patented such an application of category theory and then restricted
> its use or attempted to make undue amounts of money from it.

As a matter of fact, considering the cost of patent registration, the
depositer must expect something... Either to earn money, or to have its
competitors lose money, or (that may be the case for many public institutions)
to give evidence for "valorisation" of results to public authorities. 

Except for the last case where patents may, perhaps, not be used to prevent
scientific work, other applications of patents are likely to be problematic
both ethically and economically as far as scientific research is concerned
(think about scientists working in institutions unable to afford royalties or
attorney expenses). 


dc
-- 
David CHEMOUIL
ONERA/DTIM - 2 avenue Édouard Belin - F-31055 Toulouse
Tel: +33 (0) 5 6225 2936 - Fax: +33 (0) 5 6225 2593
http://www.onera.fr/staff/david-chemouil


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Re: patenting colimits?

[Steve Vickers]

Toby Bartels wrote:
> ...
> Certainly much of what is in the patent application is obvious,
> but perhaps not all of it; were these diagrams of diagrams a new idea?,
> or was applying them to computer system specifications a new idea?.
> ...

Dear Toby,

The idea of treating specifications as colimits is a few decades old
now. Burstall and Goguen used it in their categorical account of their
specification language Clear, with a specification used to construct a
new theory as colimit of others.

The hierarchical step, diagrams of diagrams, was studied by Catherine
Oriat in her thesis and (I believe) a TCS paper in 2000. My own student
Gillian Hill investigated a variant of this (PhD Thesis 2002; also two
papers with me, 2001, 2006), replacing the category of finite diagrams
over a base category C by the equivalent category of finitely presented
presheaves. Both are finite cocompletions, but a presheaf presentation
by generators and relations comes over neatly as a "configuration by
components and sharing". For obvious reasons the iterated construction
"flattens" back down to the single one (the construction is a KZ-monad
in the 2-category of categories). Gillian also investigated a
multi-level configuration language that maintains the hierarchical
structure without flattening (configurations of configurations of
configurations of ...) and includes cross-level specification morphisms.
However, we did not persevere to work out the categorical semantics of
this, nor did we make a computer implementation.

Regards,

Steve Vickers.


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Re: patenting colimits?

[zoran skoda]

American patent laws are radically different and more backwards in common
sense than ones say in India. In India you can patent only a process/means
how to do certain thing, not a thing itself, what is more natural, and this
is a main dispute between american industry and various movements in India.

For example, once there is a nuclear energy, one can use it for any thing
which requires energy.
But in american law it is theoretically possible that in times when there
was not  a single nuclear submarine, one registers a patent
for the idea/concept nuclear submarine without
any specific techincal details on construction. Similarly for the concept of
a shoe which charges battery by using the energy disssipated in changing
pressure on the shoe when walking.
In Indian patent law, any specific way to achieve that is patentable.
But somebody else who wishes to independently makes another design
achieving the same function can not be prevented by that patent.

Also in Indian patent law one can not patent existing
natural resources, like species of wild plants, naturally
existing compounds in plants na rocks and alike; and my
understanding is that this hence applies to mathematical facts like number
13 is prime even if before unknown to the mankind.

Zoran


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Re: patenting colimits?

[David CHEMOUIL]

Hello,

On Tue, 26 May 2009 05:46:09 +0100 (BST), Dusko Pavlovic
<Dusko.Pavlovic@comlab.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> *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.

More precisely, AFAIK, copyright effectively applies to the *form* that you
used to describe Pythagora's theorem. As such, no one is allowed to reproduce
it with the same exact form as you long as the copyright holder doesn't grant
him or her that exclusive right.


> 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.

Let us however recall that patenting algorithms is possible in the USA or in
Japan but certainly not in the EU, until now (despite much repeated lobbying
from pharmaceutical and IT companies). Still, the European Patent Office
(EPO) has already accepted tens of thousands of such patents, by cheating
with the law (indeed, the law says that you can't patent an algorithm "as
such", which the EPO interpreted as : you can patent an algorithm as long as
it is part of a "technical mechanism" such as an MP3 player, for instance).

Without even entering into social or economic outcome of "openness" of
results, or so-called innovations (see Maskin's publications for more
information, for instance), I'd like to point out an ethical issue here. That
is the harm done to a 500-year, or so, social contract between scientists
acknowledging publicly, that is in publications, that they stand on the
shoulders of giants or, with less grandiosity, on other colleagues' results. 

Of course, there is a strong incentive, to say the least, in many institutions
for the "valorisation" of results. My point is that a strong "openness" (such
as publications under "creative commons" or release of software under
free/open-source licences) may give a far better valorisation of results than
strong, defensive, appropriation, while being more compliant to centuries of
scientific practice. 


Best regards,

dc

-- 
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ONERA/DTIM - 2 avenue Édouard Belin - F-31055 Toulouse
Tel: +33 (0) 5 6225 2936 - Fax: +33 (0) 5 6225 2593
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Re: patenting colimits?

[soloviev]

Aha, and then you'll apply for a position and someone will say
that you violated a patent when you use colimits in your work.

Best -

S. Soloviev


> if they want to patent, let them patent  !!
>
>



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Re: patenting colimits?

[Zinovy Diskin]

Interestingly, software industry is heading in the opposite --
patent-free -- direction. It's called Open source software
development, and it is tremendously popular. There are several
impressive examples, such as the extremely successful Eclipse project
http://www.eclipse.org, (btw, Eclipse is partly based on categorical
ideas that engineers developed/reinvented from scratch).  Another
example is the use of open source software for commercial products by
such giants as IBM. (Of course, building legal foundations for this is
a separate story but somehow they managed it.) I have a feeling
(though i maybe wrong), that patenting is becoming an outdated
enterprise in the internet era.

Z.


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Re: patenting colimits?

[David Spivak]

One reason a mathematician may want to patent a practical use of his idea is
because if he doesn't do so, someone else can.  If some corporation spent
the money to understand a mathematical construction and then patented its
application, not only does that corporation stand to make a lot of money (on
a construction the corporation was hardly involved with), it can also keep
competitors from using the ideas.  Or, the corporation can "bury it," by
patenting the ideas and then not using them, but still using litigation to
prevent others from putting the ideas to good use.
Once you patent, you control the rights to the intellectual property, and
can make the product more or less widely available.  To me, the patenting of
an application of category theory is not an issue; the problem would be if
someone patented such an application of category theory and then restricted
its use or attempted to make undue amounts of money from it.


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Re: patenting colimits?

[Dusko Pavlovic]

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



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Re: patenting colimits?

[Eduardo J. Dubuc]

if they want to patent, let them patent  !!


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Re: patenting colimits?

[Toby Bartels]

Vaughan, I agree with nearly all that you say about how good it would be
if category theory found practical, commercially viable application.
The only thing that I don't understand is why you see patenting it
as a *good* thing, when (as you say) the purpose of a patent is
>temporarily (namely until 2025) barring entry of others
>to whatever market turns out to have been created by this application,
that is, to *prevent* (in part) commercial application.

I can only suppose that this is because patents are one of
>the usual protocols of the business world
along with many other anti-competitive practices.
(Interestingly, software patents are unavailable in much of the world,
so I'm not sure that it really makes sense to call them "usual".)
I know that if *I* ever come up with a commercially viable application (ha!),
I would not wanted to be hobbled by a patent on the relevant mathematics.


--Toby


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Re: patenting colimits?

[Greg Meredith]

Toby, et al,

Unfortunately, the patent game is more subtle than 'is it really new' on
adjudication. To the best of my understanding, the adjudication process over
a disputed claim really has a lot more to do with the depth of the pockets
of the parties involved in the dispute. Discovery and argumentation can
often be drawn out in a manner that those not quite resourced to see through
to the end of the process simply get buried. The organizations and entities
engaged in the IP-game are fully aware of this aspect of the whole
arrangement. While i'm of mixed feelings regarding the overall issue of
intellectual property, the actual motivations and carryings on of those who
do engage in this really are often quite deplorable.

Best wishes,

--greg

On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Toby Bartels <
toby+categories@ugcs.caltech.edu <toby%2Bcategories@ugcs.caltech.edu>>wrote:

> Ronnie Brown wrote:
>
> >Larry Lambe passed on the following url to me for comment and I thought it
> would be of interest to others on the category theory list, with more
> expertise than I. I have not had time to study it, but on the face of it,
>  it seems like patenting mathematics, and to be deplored intensely.  Am I
> wrong?
> >http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6964037.html
> >[...]

...

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Re: patenting colimits?

[Michael Barr]

Interesting comments by Vaughan.  I have not looked at this patent and
have no intention of doing so.  But Charles and I, both in CTCS and in a
paper published in some CS conference proceedings exhibited things like
a sketch for trees of integers as a pushout or amalgamated sum of a sketch
for trees and that for integers by identifying the sort for integers in
the latter with the sort for leaves in the fomer.  I think we have a
triple amalgamation too, something like trees of lists of integers.  So
evidence of prior art certainly exists, if anyone cares.

On the other hand, I for one would welcome serious applications of
category theory in industry.  My former department is hiring in only three
areas: number theory (in which they are truly strong), applied math, and
statistics (in each of which I rather suspect they are truly weak since
they are competing with every g-d university in North America).  I would
just love to shove it in their collective faces that by allowing the
category theory group to wither, they have allowed an important applied
area to disappear.  But no, they would rather be in the rearguard than the
advanced guard.

Wouldn't it be nice to make the same point to NSF which announced
officially in 1993 that there would never again be any funding in category
theory?

Michael


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Re: patenting colimits?

[Toby Bartels]

Ronnie Brown wrote:

>Larry Lambe passed on the following url to me for comment and I thought it would be of interest to others on the category theory list, with more expertise than I. I have not had time to study it, but on the face of it,  it seems like patenting mathematics, and to be deplored intensely.  Am I wrong?
>http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6964037.html
>[...]

It is certainly to be deplored, but I'm not sure that it's anything new.

"A computer-implemented method and system for" performing calculations
is a common patent; there are even patents on straight-up algorithms.
The U.S. patent office is far too ignorant to judge whether the idea
"would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person
having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains"
(35 U.S.C. 103), which would make the invention unpatentable.

Certainly much of what is in the patent application is obvious,
but perhaps not all of it; were these diagrams of diagrams a new idea?,
or was applying them to computer system specifications a new idea?.
If so, it's too bad if they're published here instead of in a journal.
But actually, that doesn't seem to be what the patent is about;
it spends more time explaining how to calculate colimits of graphs
and repeating the rather obvious 3-option user menu.
There is an interesting theorem about extensions of diagrams;
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.


--Toby


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Re: patenting colimits?

[Vaughan Pratt]

On 5/25/2009 6:35 AM, Ronnie Brown wrote:
> Larry Lambe passed on the following url to me for comment and I
> thought it would be of interest to others on the category theory
> list, with more expertise than I. I have not had time to study it,
> but on the face of it,  it seems like patenting mathematics, and to
> be deplored intensely.  Am I wrong?
>
>
> http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6964037.html

I skimmed the patent briefly just now, dated 2005.  I was amused to see
Dusko Pavlovic's name on it, I hadn't realized Dusko had become an
inventor (congrats, Dusko).

My first impression was that it's patenting the application of a
category theory technique to the composition of hierarchically organized
software specifications.  It wasn't immediately clear to me which claims
in the patent someone "skilled in the art" wouldn't have come up with
right away given the problem(s) claimed to have been overcome.  Since
simply aggregating things is an obvious technique, the role of the
morphisms in regulating the overlaps in the aggregation is obviously
key.  That of course is far too well known to be patentable itself.
What I couldn't find on a first pass was what problem was overcome by
what clever *and novel* trick.

As with any patent, its viability will depend on how original the
application is.  Any prior art applying it in this way will render it
vulnerable, but if the method is sufficiently novel it may serve its
intended purpose of temporarily (namely until 2025) barring entry of
others to whatever market turns out to have been created by this
application, unless the would-be competitor can come up with a
satisfactory alternative that does not infringe on this patent.
(Imagine a jury wrestling with the question of whether amalgamation as
used in logic and algebra infringes on a patent based on colimits.)

Mathematicians who are philosophically opposed to seeing their ideas put
to use in the business world should either stick to those parts of
mathematics least likely to be of practical use or prepare for the shock
of seeing their ideas used for the benefit of the non-mathematical
public in ways that enrich primarily the "last-mile" people bringing
those ideas to the public.

In the first two decades of the internet, some academics took the
attitude that no one should derive commercial benefit from the internet,
and protested strenuously whenever anyone appeared to be trying to do
so.  That dam burst around 1995, and the purists were run over in the
resulting stampede.

There is no point trying to stand in the way of a similar stampede for
commercial applications of category theory.  Either colimits will turn
out not to be a particularly effective way of assembling software
specifications, in which case the patent will have been a waste of
money, or they will turn out to be of use, in which case the purists
will (hopefully) be run over as they were for the internet.

More importantly from the perspective of mathematics, the latter outcome
will motivate the funding agencies to take category theory more
seriously and steer more support in its direction so it can grow faster
and be even more useful.  This would make category theory a secondary
beneficiary behind the primary "last-mile" beneficiaries, giving it a
more engineering flavour that brings it closer to the standing of
academic electrical engineering and computer science, whose status is
that of secondary beneficiaries of practical applications behind such
primary beneficiaries as Oracle and HP.  This connection with
practicality has not impeded theoretical computer science, which has
done quite well in the reflected glory of usefulness to the public at large.

The biggest risk to which this patent subjects category theory is that
if it fails to benefit its assignee, Kestrel, for want of interest in
its methods, then that outcome might be used in arguments against
raising the funding level for category theory research.  Funding might
then stay at the low level appropriate for truly pure mathematics, pure
in Hardy's sense of having no practical application, just enough to
support the most talented contributors to the subject while encouraging
the rest to apply their enthusiasm for mathematics to areas of greater
public benefit.

Mathematicians wanting to prevent business people from applying
mathematical results to practical problems via the usual protocols of
the business world (e.g. patents) for fear it will somehow impede or
impurify mathematics are like parents wanting to prevent doctors from
disease-proofing their kids via the usual protocols of the medical world
(e.g. vaccination) for fear it will somehow cause autism or turn their
kids into needle-using junkies.  The arguments that there are better
protocols than patents or vaccination are not widely accepted today in
the respective professional communities currently using them, though of
course that sort of thing can change with the advent of new insights and
better methods.

Vaughan Pratt


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patenting colimits?

[Ronnie Brown]

Larry Lambe passed on the following url to me for comment and I thought it would be of interest to others on the category theory list, with more expertise than I. I have not had time to study it, but on the face of it,  it seems like patenting mathematics, and to be deplored intensely.  Am I wrong? 


http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6964037.html

Title:
Method and apparatus for determining colimits of hereditary diagrams 
Document Type and Number:
United States Patent 6964037 

A computer-implemented method and system for determining colimits of hereditary diagrams. A user specifies a diagram of diagram and specifies performance of a colimit operation. Once the colimit is performed, the name of the colimit is added to the hereditary diagram. The described embodiment supports diagrams of diagrams, also called hierarchical diagrams.

Ronnie


http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6964037.html