How Can “Commonly Used Software Techniques” Be Patented?
Most of us probably think that a patent is given to the first person to invent something, but this is not quite correct. A patent may be seen as a reward for the first public disclosure of an invention. Certainly, any inventor has the right to keep an invention secret, but those who do this also give up even future rights to the patent. By keeping the invention secret, they also risk the possibility that some other inventor may come up with the same invention, patent it, and apply the patent to the original inventor. The problem with “commonly used software techniques” is that we may see their presence on a display screen, and yet still not know how the trick is done. The true description of an invention is not what it does, but how it does it, and in software systems, most such descriptions are kept hidden in secret source code. But an invention which is kept secret not only does not qualify for a patent, it also does not constitute a full public disclosure, or “prior art,” which woul
