From phm@a2e.de  Mon Oct 16 08:22:45 2000
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 10:22:45 +0200 (CEST)
From: PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de
Subject: [Patents] Counterexamples to John, Hartmut, Edward

> John writes:
> >Posters here have cited drug development as an area where the patent
> >system works, and I think that there are plenty such areas.
> 
> Don't say that do people in third world countries who can't afford to
> use patented AIDS drugs.  You can't use some patented software, you
> do something else with software.  You can't use some patented AIDS
> drug, you die.  So when it comes to suffering because of software patents,
> that is nothing compared to the suffering of lack of access to drugs,
> which has become so controversial that it is an issue in the current
> US presidential campaign.

Again you are mixing up two things.
The patent system works fairly well for promoting progress in the area of
drugs.
And the drug patent lobby points out with some justification that many of
the drugs for which third-world activists want free licenses would not
exist if there hadn't been a patent system in place.  Chemists very rarely
advance any fundamental criticism against the patent system.

Software patents on the contrary are criticized from within the software
developping circles because they stifle progress, and nobody is asking for
lower-price third-world licenses on proprietary software products.

The underlying reason why drug patents are accepted is that they are based
on new empirical knowledge, i.e. require expensive experimentation.

This has actually been known from the 60s, when economists remarked that
patents work rather well in those fields where innovation is associated
with new empirical knowledge.  I can give you such a citation.  But your
arguments make it look to me as though your learning interest was very
selective, and economics or patentability limiting criteria were way
outside of its scope anyway.

> >That is why I am all riled up against software patents.  It feel as if
> >the system holds a gun to my head with every piece of code I write.
 
> Unless the code you are writing is going to be worth lots and lots of 
> money, no one with a software patent is ever going to pay the slightest
> bit of attention to the code you are writing.  You paranoia is greatly
> exaggerated.

The monetary value of information is always based on artificial scarcity.
The existence of a patent provides a means of creating this "value by
scarcity".  Once the industry stops expanding and fights for a limited
market, people will discover how this value can be turned into money.  And
then anyone who publishes openly available source code becomes an easy 
target.  Such source code is the primary threat to scarcity.

-phm





