[Patents] Patent system run for consumers or producers?

[Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com]

Apparently this whole exchange reduces down to one issue, Hartmut's
fourth criteria for patentability after novelty,obviousness,enablement.
His fourth criteria is:

        technicity aka concreteness aka physical substance.

I reject that criteria.  What all of these arguments come down to is
that in prior times, in a mostly industrial society/economy, we had a
patent system for protecting the mostly technical, concrete, physical
inventions that dominated, inventions that were new ideas with very
valuable economic rights associated.

We increasingly now have a service/information society/economy, where
new ideas still have valuable economic rights associated, but where
the ideas are not expressed "physically".

I am arguing to adapt the patent system (I don't have much regard for
copyright, given its weakening by the courts) to protect new ideas,
even new ideas that are not "physical".  Hartmut is arguing that we
effectively get rid of the patent system and not adapt it to protect
new ideas that are not "physical".

I completely disagree, and it is not a matter of proof or reliance on
American or German court decisions.  It is a social choice, and I choose
to adapt the patent system to more effectively recognize and protect
new ideas, no matter how they are embodied.

Look at the patents in all three fields "physical" fields: mechanical,
chemical and electrical.  Increasingly they are becoming more and 
information/software oriented.  Increasingly then arguing to prohibit
software patents is an argument to prohibit all patents.  One can
rashly conclude that Hartmut is against not just software patents, but
all patents, hiding behind this illdefined concept of something being
"technical/concrete" or not.

For example, there are certain forms of programmable gate array processors,
where the structure of the processor is reconfigured from cycle to cycle
by patterns loaded in from onchip memories to reconfigure the gate arrays.
Are these patterns loaded in from the memories "hardware" or "software"?
Who cares?  It is both physical devices (gate arrays) and information
being manipulated together and intimately - and drawing a line seems like
trying to figure out how angels dance on the head of a pin.  All I really
care about is whether the gate array patterns are novel and unobvious and
fully disclosed.  If so, they get a patent, whether you call them
hardware, software, physical, technicity, whatever.

I am a betting man.  I will bet any amount of money that any argument
based on Hartmut's technicity focus will fail in leading to any
substantial change in patenting.  It is not a matter of right or wrong,
but rather if enough companies will support such a view.  I bet they
won't, and will bet a dinner in San Francisco against a dinner in
Munich.

Greg