If you are interested in furthering the discussion, answering my questions to arrive at mutually-agreeable point would be a great step forward.

If your logic is supreme, it will be its own evidence, will it not? If your position is so fundamentally sound that it can not be breached, you would have no need to deflect or call names or imply inferiority in others. All such are emotive claims, are they not? I understand that this ruling affects your livelihood and you feel threatened by it. That is no excuse to project your insecurities onto us and claim that we are the ones who can't remain objective. Shame on you.

Now.

Can there be multiple parties who claim primacy of use of property - or even secondary use? There frequently are. That is the reason why people apply for patents in the first place: to secure primacy of use of intellectual property. It is the reason people file property transfer agreements with their local governmental offices when they purchase a lot of land. They seek the enforcement of primacy of use in a government-recognized monopoly. A breach of this primacy of use can be named trespassing (in the case of land), copyright- or patent-infringement in the case of IP, etc. Are the terms of every property recognition identical? No, and no one is arguing otherwise. But definitionally, property rights concern primacy of use, duration of use, and the degree of exclusivity of such use. The government is only a recognizer and arbiter of such (aside from frequently inserting itself as a claimant) - however it is not a grantor.

Further, though a market may be inferred based on the concepts embodied in the patent for suitability of use, there is nowhere in the patent application or subsequent grant that designates a market of use - that is entirely up to the holder of the patent to determine. The claim that the government grants a right to a market should immediately offend any true Objectivist because it is an assertion that the government has the right to create and/or control such markets in the first place!

Advancing the discussion is seeking for the reality or truth of a matter. It begins with an agreement upon definitions, which has not yet been accomplished. It absolutely precludes the use of ad hominem or other attacks on participating parties. When you are in the courtroom, you don't call the opposing lawyer an imbecile - you treat them with respect. You are invited to do the same here. And as lawyers, I am surprised that you do not recognize that we are still in discovery - we haven't even moved to trial, let alone judgment. To declare that the case is closed falls outside your jurisdiction.

Exclusivity is equivalent to monopoly. From Merriam-Webster:

Monopoly
1. exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action

Monopoly. A. Identity.
Exclusivity. B. Identity.
Monopoly = Exclusivity. A = B. Definition.
A patent grants exclusivity. C -> A. Definition.
Hence C -> B: a patent grants a monopoly. Transitive use.

My point was not to make a religious one, but to illustrate the absurdity of your argument by arguing an extreme case of your own supposition. I am not arguing that one does not have primacy of use of one's own body - I am arguing that placing the government as the determiner of such primacy is inherently fallacious. The government recognizes rights, however, it does NOT grant them.

When you register a patent, you are applying for official recognition for your efforts in the form of monopolistic or exclusive use. You are staking a claim to a particular idea or process and requesting legal recognition and enforcement. But it is NOT the government that grants those rights. It can not unless it is the originator of those rights, which it is not. You are confusing rights with recognition of rights. The rights exist independently of any governmental presence; what the government provides is an enforcement mechanism for the recognition of rights. That is all I have been saying all along.

You don't have a concept of property. It is not about an idea, it is about creation. All human creation starts with the mind - otherwise animals would be farming, driving cars, building steam engines etc. Thus all property rights are protecting products of the mind.

here is Ayn Rand's response to your question:
"As an objection to the patent laws, some people cite the fact that two inventors may work independently for years on the same invention, but one will beat the other to the patent office by an hour or a day and will acquire an exclusive monopoly, while the loser’s work will then be totally wasted. This type of objection is based on the error of equating the potential with the actual. The fact that a man might have been first, does not alter the fact that he wasn’t. Since the issue is one of commercial rights, the loser in a case of that kind has to accept the fact that in seeking to trade with others he must face the possibility of a competitor winning the race, which is true of all types of competition." Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

4)You want to divide out each component of an invention and claim obviousness. That is not how to look at inventions. They do not spring from thin air! They are made up of other inventions already known or even well-known. A car uses wheels, for example. I am done on this post discussing conservation of matter.
1) every invention can be an abstraction. The concept of human being is an abstraction. This is why the Supreme Court ruling in this case, citing Alice's invention as ineligible due to abstraction is absurd. It gives no distinction or guidance against any invention moving forward. Just because you can bank online does not mean your bank account is not real and tangible. But there is no vault at your bank holding the physical cash balance in your name.
This is just one shining example of how SCOTUS does not understand patent law, inventions, or technology.
3) db runs a blog that tracks this closely. http://www.hallingblog.com. Fighting this intellectual battle is one reason why we "shrugged." Individuals refuse to use logic and reason on the subject of patents, anti-patent groups (such as von MIses-btw Benthum who was tasked by the von mises group to define property rights is a self-proclaimed socialist) exploit limited government thinkers like yourself to their side with specious claims and untruths. We try to be a voice for that person, inventor, who wants to make a livelihood inventing. It is their right to pursue it. But sentiments such as yours, based on false information and illogical threaten those livelihoods.

Blarman, you are not serious, you are not interested in logic and evidence, and you are not advancing the discussion.

Blarman, you are not serious, you are not interested in logic and evidence, and you are not advancing the discussion.

Blarman, you are not serious, you are not interested in logic and evidence, and you are not advancing the discussion.

Software is just a bunch of words. When it is executed by an electronic circuit (compiler) it is converted into a wiring instructions.

Blarman, you are not serious, you are not interested in logic and evidence, and you are not advancing the discussion.

You do not understand property rights, you do not know how to read a claim, you do not know how patents work, you have not read the patent in the case.

Your like a college freshman pontificating on quantum mechanics.

Blarman, you are not serious, you are not interested in logic and evidence, and you are not advancing the discussion.

Once again you show your ignorance of law. Ownership in land gives you the right to exclude others. But it does not give you a right to do whatever you want with land.

You do not understand what a monopoly is. Go read up on the Statute of Monopolies. It is about the government granting a exclusive right to a market. A patent and a property right do not do this.

Blarman, you are not serious, you are not interested in logic and evidence, and you are not advancing the discussion.

it is the result of the combination of elements which creates something new. there is no such thing as *improvement* concept in patents. They are new inventions. Prior Art looks at combinations as a whole. Not individual parts. For example, a new smart phone has a micro-processor. A patent examiner is not allowed to reject your new smart phone invention just because it utilizes a micro-processor.
The metaphysical basis for this would be conservation of matter and energy. cell phones do not appear out of thin air. They are made up of prior inventions.

You are an idiot - you can't do any engineering without an understanding of math. That does not make engineering math. You clearly have no idea what mathematics is about and no idea how computers work. Mathematics is about proofs that advance the logical system in which the specific area of math. Engineering and science is about applying that math. Besides most CS people really do very little math. They worry about I/O issues, they worry about databases, they worry about communication protocols. The idea that CS is about math is beyond absurd.

Actually, the whole purpose of s/w is to create a circuit. The s/w is does nothing by itself, it is the circuit that does the real work. Like so many CS people your lack of engineering shows you really don't even know what your are doing.Anything done is sw can be done in hardware, but not vice versa.

NO. what the heck is so hard logically about this for you? again, you are taking a short cut. Ultimately, you do not *believe* you own yourself. Something else does.
If you own yourself, you own the products of your mind, your labor. That is the moral justification for the right to a patent.
Monopoly tests:
1. does not grant you exclusive access to a market
2. does not grant you a right to produce or manufacture a product
3. freely alienable (you can sell it, buy it, with no prejudice)
4. anyone can get one
Blarman, I am no longer on this post going to argue patents as monopolies. You are not choosing to apply logic to the objective arguments

You are taking a short cut in logic blarman and I think fundamentally this is a religious one. You do not accept that you own yourself. This is the basis of all property rights. Locke, Blackstone (through english common law), Jefferson, Rand-all acknowledge natural rights. So either you do not accept humans have natural rights or you are purposely trying to obfuscate.

Without involving patents in any way, Ayn Rand's moral point could have been made if Hank Rearden had been forced to sign a “gift certificate” giving away his trade secret for the process of creating Rearden Metal. And would it be okay for the government to deny Rearden the right to manufacture and sell his metal, the product of his own mind and years of work, if someone else filed a patent for a similar process a few hours earlier than he did?

To reiterate: My concept of “ownership” does not include forbidding someone else from doing something because I claim to have thought of it first. A person has the fundamental right to promote his/her own well-being by the application of knowledge obtained from others (unless constrained by voluntary contract, such as those protecting trade secrets), as well as from original thought and experience.

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation." --Thomas Jefferson

Excellent point.

Yes.

Not quite. A computer is a set of circuits that can be dynamically re-assigned based on conditions in order to perform certain tasks that may be altered during execution or interrupted/preempted entirely. There is the hardware aspect of the computer that specifically conforms to your restricted definition, but once you start laying on the firmware and software and interfaces you abstract the hardware entirely from the process.

That's the problem with attempting to define software as circuits. It is better labeled the instructions used to manipulate the circuits - not the circuits themselves.

But at one point, it was a novel invention which under today's patent system would probably have qualified for a patent. I think that's all he's trying to say.

"given my limited experience with programming"

I would just add this: If you do not understand the subject matter, I would advise against attempting to describe why or why it doesn't qualify as novel until you do.

1) How does one define an abstract idea at all? It is the process of turning the abstract into the concrete that creates a standard, is it not?

2) Invariably there are going to be a lot of patents which are going to get invalidated. You make the dubious assumption that those patents were correctly granted in the first place. And the invalidation process doesn't happen automatically - the challenger still has the uphill battle to prove that the patent was awarded incorrectly. I think you are taking an extreme view of this. Note that I do not dispute that this will make obtaining a new patent on software more difficult.
3) Why don't you track how many of these companies exist and how many go out of business due to patent-invalidation to explore your hypothesis. I'm personally very skeptical of such a claim, having had two brothers and a brother-in-law that worked in that exact field.
4) What does conservation of matter have to do with organization or manifestation of matter in a particular form? This claim makes absolutely zero sense. And the other part of your claim is of a similarly dubious nature as the definition of a patent includes the novel use of a system (of parts).

By that logic, you would destroy the very foundation for patents completely, citing prior art. I don't think your logic there holds.

So I can come use your home whenever I like, then? I can come borrow your car without your permission? I can raid your bank account?

I am trying to point out the absolute absurdity and incongruity of your position.