Why should the computer scientist or engineer need to know about patents? I went though university blissfully unaware of the patent and it didn't do me any harm. So, what's the big deal?

I first became aware the notion of patents when I was asked to be an expert witness in an action between two semiconductor companies. One company was manufacturing a chip that the other said had violated its patent. I was asked to read the patents involved and comment. I looked at the patent and my first thought was "What language is this?". It certainly wasn't everyday English and it wasn't the language used in academic papers of text books. It was the impenetrable language used by patent lawyers. In this language you never write "several processors", you write "a plurality of processors".

Patent law differs from country to country. Here we will attempt to provide a general overview of the concepts involved. You should not take what I say as the law. Those who wish to patent something must seek appropriate legal advise. The purpose of this web page is to create an awareness of the patent.

Patents are intended to protect the owner of an invention or a process from others stealing the idea and using it themselves. Without patients, some of the incentive to create new products would disappear if you had to spend years doing research that was immediately available to your competitions. Of course, without patents the world would not stop because you can also protect your invention by means of the trade secret. Or hire someone to make your competitors an offer they can't refuse.

The majority of patents are concerned with a device or article or a way of doing something; for example, you may be able to patent an arithmetic unit designed to speed up the addition of two n-bit numbers. Other companies that use the same techniques to perform addition will be guilty of patent infringement if they do not get your permission. Even if they do not know about your patent, they are still guilty of infringement.

What Can be patented?

You can't get rich by rushing out and patenting the wheel. If you wish to patent something it has to be novel; the wheel isn't novel - everyone knows about it. Your invention or process must not be trivial otherwise there is no merit in the patent. You can establish the novelty of an invention by demonstrating that there are no references to it in other patents of the literature.  Conversely, when patent litigation takes place and A sues B for infringing A's patent, B tries to prove that A's patent is invalid because the invention it discloses was not novel.

The other aspect of a patent is its merit; for that, the patent must be non-obvious. But to whom? In the language of patent law, there is a person who is "skilled in the art"; for example, when considering the patenting of a fast adding circuit, someone skilled in the art would be a digital designer who designs circuits. This means that the invention, the fast adder, would not be obvious to the skilled digital designer.

When trying to prove that a patent is invalid, you have to find information that would be available to "one skilled in the art" that would suggest to them or show them the way to  implement the invention that is the subject of he patent (i.e., the invention is obvious to one skilled in the art).

The patent prevents others from implementing the invention or process that's the subject of the patent. But, a patent does not necessarily give its owner the right to exploit the invention. If I patent an entirely new form of transport, it may well be that I can exploit the patient. Suppose I patent a new means of vaporizing gasoline in a carburetor. In this case I am making a modification to an existing invention and I cannot manufacture the improvement without infringing the underlying patent on the carburetor.