[Patents] Re: ICANN elections -- Endorsement of a candidate -- URGENT

[PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de]

> > According people ownership on abstract ideas is something outrageous even
> > to patent experts, who go long ways to pretend that they are patenting
> > only a "technical invention".
> 
> What do you think of copyright? It is also ownership on any kind of ideas.

no.  explicitely not.
 
> > At the same time, "reducing the
> > duration" is a dead-end strategy that violates TRIPS and is not even
> > justifyable, because for many material inventions (such as should be
> > patentable under classical patent law) 20 years is not too much but too
> > little.
> >
 
> If you have this strong position on patents in general (material
> invention), I don't understand at all your position on any kind of
> patents on software. I don't understand why you promote a such huge
> difference between both types. Ecomical logic is the same.

The economic logic between material "inventions" and immaterial 
"innovations" is radically different.

There are some nice articles that show how patents are geared toward
specificity / concreteness / materiality while software innovation strives
for abstractness[1].  This leads to absurd situations where a QSort
algorithm cannot be owned while an equivalent "process for sorting postal
packages" can. Therefore a true "invention", as opposed to a software
innovation, must be based on (1) new knowledge of natural forces
(technicity)  (2) novel ways of applying these insights to a problem of
    production of material goods (industriality)

The concept of "invention" works best in fields where there is a close
link between the theoretical model of nature (1) and the application (2),
such as chemistry and pharmacy.  In these areas the patent system is known
to perform useful functions as a rewarder of R&D[2], and at the same time
it is known that the investments in a new drug often take a long time to
get amortised. Sometimes the first 10 years or more of patent lifetime are
spent on passing all kinds of approval procedures.

> > What chills me even more is that Bernhard Lang introduces M. Benhamou as a
> > person with special competence on the issue of intellectual property.
> > This leads me to conclude that he must be a mischievous propagandist of
> > the patent lobby, since I can no longer excuse his statements by
> > ignorance.
> >
> 
> Everybody is a foe, isn't it?

I didn't mean to say anything about Benhamou himself.  Only about the
conclusions that seem logical when reading the Le Monde article and
combining it with what Bernhard Lang said about his knowledge of IP
issues.

-phm

---
[1] see articles by TAMAI Tetsuo and others, summarized in Appendix G
        of http://swpat.ffii.org/xatra/epue28/epue28de.pdf
[2] see articles by W. Kingston and others, summarized as above