[Patents] Technical effect

[John Tobey jtobey@john-edwin-tobey.org]

Edward Avis <epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk> wrote:
> >From: "Stephen Probert" <stephenprobert@hotmail.com>
> 
> >The UK Patent Office does grant patents for computer programs,
> >provided that the program is capable of producing a technical effect
> >when run on a computer.
> 
> Every program from Hello World onwards produces a technical effect when
> run on a computer.

I've been thinking about this "technical effect" distinction.  I don't
know what court or legislature introduced it, but it must have meant
something to whoever first used the term.  Does anyone here have a
good legal definition?  If not, perhaps we should create one.  I have
an idea about what its intent may have been, and I think the notion of
technical effect could help in delineating what should and should not
be patentable.

Good patents are like recipes.  They tell you what things to do to
some kind of matter to produce a desired result.  If there were no
prior art in cookiemaking, I might be allowed to patent this:

    1. Combine flour, eggs, and sugar.
    2. Place pieces on a cookie sheet.
    3. Bake for 10 minutes.

A machine that let you pour in the raw ingredients and performed these
steps would infringe my patent, as would the selling of cookies that
were made according to the recipe.

Consider a combination of two machines, one a general-purpose computer
and the other a robotic oven similar to the infringing machine.  This
oven does not know the correct ordering of the three instructions,
although it is capable of performing each of them.  It has a built-in
scanner that can read printouts of the instructions, which come from
the general-purpose computer.  The oven can perform the actions
corresponding to the printed instructions in the order they appear.

Does the robotic oven alone infringe the patent?  I don't think so,
because it embodies only the steps and not the algorithm.  So, what
about this program:

    print "Combine flour, eggs, and sugar.";
    print "Place pieces on a cookie sheet.";
    print "Bake for 10 minutes.";

In conjunction with the computer and the robotic oven, this produces
the machine that I've said infringes my cookie patent.  It is,
therefore, software capable producing a technical effect.

I would like to say that the program should not be patentable any more
than the computer or the oven (as cookie producers).  However, I think
its capability of producing a technical effect differentiates it from:

    print "Hello, world!";

I find two qualities of the cookie program worthy of note.  One is
that its output necessarily concerns matter and physical processes.
The other is that its function does not depend on human processes.

A text-searching program would not qualify, because its function
affects only data.  The fact that, in practice, the text is stored on
some physical media should not make it patentable.  The program is
about data manipulation, not input or output methods.

Amazon's one-click patent may have the desirable (to some people)
effect of keeping Jeff Bezos' pool clean (if he has a pool), but it
does so only indirectly in ways that depend on human processes.
Because of one-click, competing sites are more annoying to customers,
so more people buy from Amazon (a human process).  This way, Amazon
makes more money (or loses less money, or something like that), so
Jeff can afford to have his pool professionally cleaned (another human
process).  The important thing is that the one-click method does not
produce a "technical effect" according to my tentative definition.

Food for thought.

-John