From Bernard.Lang@inria.fr  Mon Sep 18 08:10:42 2000
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 10:10:42 +0200
From: Bernard Lang Bernard.Lang@inria.fr
Subject: [Patents] US government concerned about deleterious impact of software patents


This is one of many reports of the US Academy of Sciences.

Several concern Intellectual property, and they have the weight of the
recognized competence of the committee members. 

   I know only some names on that committee:

 PAMELA SAMUELSON, University of California, Berkeley 
  she is a law professor (I guess we all know her)

 STUART SHIEBER, Harvard University
  professor of computer science and computational linguistics

 SUSAN L. GRAHAM, University of California, Berkeley 
  prof of computer sciences (Programming languages)

 BUTLER W. LAMPSON, Microsoft Corporation
  Computer Sc.

 FRANCES E. ALLEN, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
   Computer science (Compilers and optimization)

 DAVID A. PATTERSON, University of California, Berkeley 
   Theoretical Computer science

  All are at the very top in their fields (I have known them all, for
about 20 years - except P. Samuelson)

  These are no jokers, and their names carry weight.

  The purpose is not legal quibbling, but understanding long term
issues, but the people who are top practionners, and giving guidelines
for future policy (though they may be influenced by local ideology -
who would not be).  Lawyers are supposed to implement policy, not to
make it by quibbling about their past publications and mistakes and
preconceived ideas.

  I read some previous reports on IP (especially one on Data Bases,
and one on IP in life sciences). Very instructive, and fairly
unbiased, in my opinion.  They are all on the web.

Bernard


On Sun, Sep 10, 2000 at 05:17:48PM +0200, PILCH Hartmut wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Sep 2000, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> 
> > With regards to the report Hartmut mentioned, it was written by people
> > with less than a complete understanding of modern information
> > processing technologies.  It should not be taken too seriously.  The
> > report is sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, whose patent
> > analysis activities are not very rigorous.
> 
> The report is certainly not based on the analysis of a lot of individual
> patents.  Very few people apart from Greg do such analyses anyway.
> 
> I found it difficult to classify this report.  It is somewhere between a
> juridical analysis, an economic impact analysis and a policy document by a
> governmental agency (comparable to the report of the European Committee of
> Regions, which reaches similar conclusions on software patentability).
> 
> Whatever the quality of the report:  it is certainly a lot more rigorous
> than all the policy documents on which the patent lobby bases its
> decisions, such as the EC Greenpaper and its followup document.  A
> doctoral thesis from Linz University analyses this green paper and other
> EC documents, just to be awarded a doctorate for arriving at the
> conclusion that almost every sentence the EC writes is pure crap.
> 
> Unfortunately I have no way to find out who stands behind the NAS report
> on the Digital Dilemma and what authority it may have as a public policy
> document.  The paper of the Committee of Regions at least carries the
> weight of a few hundred prominent regional politicians, but in practise
> that does not seem to weigh a lot.
> 
> -phm
> 
> 
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