Читать книгу Intellectual Property Law for Engineers, Scientists, and Entrepreneurs - Howard B. Rockman - Страница 55

Disclosure of one’s invention to the public is the primary object of patent systems everywhere, with exclusive rights granted to those inventors to commercialize the invention for a limited period being their reward for publicly disclosing their invention. Prior to the existence of patent laws, inventors were operating their inventions in secret, trying to maintain such secrecy as long as possible so as not to have their invention stolen from them. As early as 1623 in England, it was decided that, to urge these inventors to disclose their inventions to the public and make such inventions available for the public good, a limited exclusive right should be granted to those inventors for the commercialization of their inventions. In exchange for that limited exclusive right, the law required that the inventors make full disclosure of their inventions to the public, so that once the patent grant expired, the public would have the full benefit of using that particular invention. Today’s patent law requires, for example, that the specification in a patent contain a full, clear, exact, and concise description of the invention so as to enable one skilled in the art to practice the invention upon the expiration of the patent without undue experimentation. The U.S. patent law also requires that the inventor must place in the specification the “best mode” of practicing the invention as of the date of filing the patent application. This prevents an inventor from setting forth in any patent specification a less than perfect embodiment of the invention, while exploiting a more perfect version of the invention.

Therefore, the laws of the United States and many countries are quite specific as to the depth of description that must be placed in the patent application, including drawings where necessary to inform one skilled in the related art of the structure and operation of the invention. In the case of software inventions, some inventors place the source code in the patent specification. Others do not, and use flow diagrams to fully describe the invention. I have been looking for court decisions that may indicate that, if a patent issues without a source code on software, the invention has not been fully disclosed. So far, I have not seen such a decision. It is my understanding, being a mechanical engineer, that possibly one can duplicate an algorithm or a computer program without information supplied from the source code. See Chapter 13 for the existing law regarding obtaining patent protection for computer‐related inventions.