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Revision as of 09:01, 26 October 2010
In the cabinet for the blind example, a person develops a cabinet which reads books out loud. What's in the cabinet? Does the contents of the cabinet change whether the idea is a patentable invention? The cabinet could contain:
- Innovative hardware
- Software running on a standard computer
- A person
1980 amicus brief from Martin Goetz
When arguing that software should be patentable, Martin Goetz presented the example thusly:[1]
An inventor demonstrates his new invention to his patent attorney with great pride; he has developed a cabinet for reading books out loud to the blind. The cabinet contains both a reading and talking computer. After the demonstration, the patent attorney responds:
What's inside the cabinet? Did you build it with software or hardware (a stored program or hardware circuitry)? If built with a hardware program, your machine would be patentable. But if you built it with a stored program, the Patent Office would say it was merely mathematics and, therefore, unpatentable.”