[Patents] wide realm of future patentability

[PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de]

A current tendency of the patent system is to formulate the principles
that

- anything "technical", e.g. anything that makes use of
  natural laws to perform a certain function, is patentable
- a Turing machine is a device that makes use of natural laws

==> any process of executing a computer program is patentable, but
    not the program itself
==> these conclusions are independent of the EPC.  Change of the EPC
    is irrelevant to the legal situation.  The only reason to change
    the EPC is that this will remove some confusion.    

This is what the specialist at the German Patent Office (DPA) told me.  I
will receive a collection of his articles on the subject and know more
details later.

There are of course quite a lot of things that can be executed via a
Turing machine.  Including

        - postscript files
        - musical compositions
        - business methods
        - the hypertext structure of articles typeset in TeX
        - the semantic structure of texts written in Logical Language[1] 

Any technique to realise one of these through a turing machine in order to
perform a certain function (e.g. making cows sleep by means of music,
enhancing the concentration power of readers by rhetorical devices) will
consequently have to be patentable.  But, as the DPA specialist said,
there are rare cases where it can be proved that a piece of music uses a
technique for a purely functional purpose.  It must be proven that a
claimed invention is really related to the cows and not just to improving
the artistic quality of music.[2]

The fact that one *can* make a business out of something is a sufficient
reason to suppress any non-business use of that technique.  Anything
non-business is potentially business, and business is the point of view,
under which everything is seen by the patent system. As the patent
specialist at the DPA/GPO told me, "Free Software has become a force in
the market and can therefore not be placed under special protection".

The DPA itself has developped some large-scale non-commercial software
which the authors wanted to make free.  But the Patent Office didn't allow
this, because it "had been put under pressure by the industry not to
engage in anything that could represent a competition to private
business".

This is also Mr Breese's (bresse.fr) line of argumentation: free software
as an illicit competition by state-paid people to the proprietary software
industry.

-------------
[1] Logical Language (http://www.lojban.org) makes the potential realm of
patents especially wide.

There is a parser, developped on Linux of course, which turns Lojban texts
into Prolog structures.  There is even a way of writing Prolog programs in
Lojban.  Almost anything that can be expressed in English (except for
wordplays that depend on English word forms) or other natural languages
can be expressed in Lojban.  Complicated relationships can be expressed
much more conveniently (e.g. 1 sentence rather than a paraphrase of 20).

[2] I would bet that a good lawyer will prove this.

--
phm