[Patents] Re: [Patents] Re: Patents digest, Vol 1 #162 - 2 msgs

[Tom Vogt tom.vogt@ricardo.de]

> Even software patent advocates must recognize this problem.  In fact, imho
> the above statement from Mr Bezos is the only one in his letter that I can
> really subscribe to and recommend as a progress.  The conclusions he draws
> (like limiting the duration of software patents), are of course neither
> practicable nor really justified, as you point out correctly.  The only
> solution to the patent crisis that I see is:  take software and business
> methods out of the patent system and, if necessary, design sui generis
> systems for them.

I don't think that will solve the problem, not as long as lawyers are
involved.

for example, the software patent I currently oppose (7val's Location
Poisoning, see my website at http://www.lemuria.org/Software/unpoison)
is being submitted for patent even though software patents are illegal
in europe.
the submission thus simply reads "a process for...", and I'm willing to
be a years wage that it does a great job at obfuscating the fact that
what they want to patent is a trivial piece of software that, for
example, took me all of 9 lines of code(!) to duplicate.


personally, I would propose a more radical change to the patent (and
related) system(s): make intellectual property rights available only to
entities that do have an intellect. namely: humans. a company cannot be
creative, so it shouldn't be capable of holding copyrights.