I think there's widespread agreement that the U.S. patent system has problems.
One challenge regulators have is that it's already extremely tough to distinguish between "software" and "hardware" -- and it's getting tougher. Should a software-defined radio -- or some novel part of a software-defined radio -- be patentable, for example? Is an ASIC patentable while exactly the same algorithms running on an embedded processor are not? What about novel biological machines, which are literally "coded" in DNA and RNA to perform certain very mechanical (or chemical) jobs? It's really tough to draw this line even if you want to. And I think I want to, personally. But I don't have the answer to this problem. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples Consulting Enterprise IT Architect (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
