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TheodoreSmith-FirstPaper 10 - 09 Nov 2008 - Main.TheodoreSmith
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THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS | | | The Strange Properties of Molecules | |
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< | 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 for known chemical structures would likely be even simpler to develop. | >
> | 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 for chemical structures would likely be even simpler to develop. | | | 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. | | | Of these two doctrines, obviousness is the least likely to be disruptive to the patentability of molecular compounds. Although it could be argued that the combination of trivial enablement and computationally accessible discrete structures make nearly any chemical compound "obvious ... to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains," and therefore unpatentable, it is unlikely, given the history and economic importance of these patents, that either the Patent Office or the Federal Courts would accept such arguments. | |
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> | The doctrine of novelty is likely to affect the patentability of chemical compounds in a far more profound manner. Under the 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 doing the research necessary to actually file a patent. Although filing a patent requires additional research into the usefulness of the compound, this is unlikely to cost orders of magnitude more than the research necessary for synthesis. Second, it has made the actual cost of filing the patent, while non-trivial, cheaper in relation to the amounts of capital spent on research and development. These ratios encourage the development of patents, as opposed to the generation of public prior art; both ratios decrease the marginal cost of applying for a patent over simply publishing information into the public domain.
With the trivialization of the enablement step and the advent of near-zero-cost publishing on the internet, both these ratios shift substantially. A public internet wiki with computationally inexpensive algorithms for permuting and enabling molecular structures drops the cost of publishing invalidating prior art to nearly nothing. Although a pharmaceutical company may
The identification of interesting compounds, however the
, has been nearly For the purposes of this essay, this historical expense is interesting because of two ratios. The first ratio describes the cost of developing and publishing invalidating prior art versus doing the research necessary to actually file a patent. Historically, these costs have generally been of similar magnitudes; although a patent requires additional research into the usefulness of the compound, any demonstrated use will suffice to fulfill th
is the With computationally cheap methods of generating descriptions | | | Once techniques for systematically fabricating chemical compounds enter the scientific mainstream, the enablement of any sufficiently well described molecule becomes trivial (or at least may be rendered trivial by the development of a computer algorithm capable of generating enablement steps from chemical diagrams). Once this point is reached, any novel compound could be placed in the public domain simply through public online publication of its chemical structure and build routine; an extensive database of permutations of chemical forms would provide a legal basis on which to invalidate new compound patents.
Other forms of Patent Protection |
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