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TheodoreSmith-FirstPaper 14 - 09 Jan 2009 - Main.TheodoreSmith
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Placing Molecular Compounds in the Public Domain | | | Once the manual construction of any sufficiently described molecule becomes technically feasible, enablement is almost certain to become trivial to a person skilled in the technical art. Computer programs that permute and diagram extant molecular structures are scientific reality; an algorithm capable of generating build routines would likely be even simpler to develop. | |
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< | Trivial enablement, by itself, is no block to patentability. Many simple mechanical devices are trivial to enable. Molecular structures, however, have the additional property of having a form consisting of a collection of discrete and finite components. The structure of simple molecule, such as H2O, can be described in detail simply by extrapolating from the basis of its chemical formula. More complex chemical forms have many more possible structural arrangements, and are more difficult to describe; however, techniques for permuting the possible structures of these complex molecules have been developing in the prior art for some time. | >
> | Trivial enablement, by itself, is no block to patentability. Many simple mechanical devices are trivial to enable. Molecular structures, however, have the additional property of having a form consisting of a collection of discrete and finite components. The structure of simple molecules, such as H2O, can be described in detail simply by extrapolating from the basis of its chemical formula. More complex chemical forms have many more possible structural arrangements, and are more difficult to describe; however, techniques for permuting the possible structures of these complex molecules have been developing in the prior art for some time. | | | The combination of trivial enablement and a finite structure would place chemical compounds within a unique class respective to patent law. A full description and build routine of a novel compound could be generated from a small amount of descriptive data, in some cases as little as a name.
The Internet Is for Publishing | |
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< | Legally, the trivialization of the enablement of molecular compounds is likely to cause the most disruption within the patent doctrine of novelty. Under novelty rules, a patent may be invalidated by published prior art that both describes and enables the claims of the patent. In the field of chemistry, the creation of invalidating prior art has historically been expensive; the synthesis of a novel chemical compound is research intensive, and the cost to physically publish the information is non-trivial. | >
> | Legally, the trivialization of the enablement of molecular compounds is likely to cause the most disruption within the patent doctrine of novelty. Under novelty rules, a patent may be invalidated by published prior art that both describes and enables the claims of the patent. In the field of chemistry, the creation of invalidating prior art has historically been expensive: the synthesis of a novel chemical compound is research intensive, and the cost to physically publish the information is non-trivial. | | | Historically, we may look at this expense as having two important effects. First, it sets the cost of generating invalidating prior art close to the cost of the research necessary to actually file a patent. Second, it makes the cost of filing a patent cheaper relative to the amount of capital spent on research and development. These ratios have encouraged the development of patents over the generation of public prior art; they have decreased the marginal cost of seeking a patent over simply publishing information into the public domain. |
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