[Patents] simple questions

[Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com]

>Being honest, I should acknowledge that I am speculating, but I think
>that in the HALF TERM patenting software will stagnate IT.

Speculating wrong.  There is no empirical evidence that developments
in IT have stagnated at any time in the last thirty years.  Just
walk into an engineering library and see the growing amount of
shelf space needed for all of the books, journals and conferences
dealing with IT.  There is also no emprical evidence that the rate
of growth of developements in IT have stagnated at any time in the
last thirty years.  Indeed, in the formative years of the software
industry, 1970-1994, when there was a fair amount of software
patenting, it would have been difficult to argue that software
patents were stagnating IT because outside of some big companies,
no one was paying attention to software patents to then be
negatively influenced.

Additionally, in the last thirty years, if you ask software companies
which effects have had the greatest impact on their profitability
and stock market price, software patents will be low down on the list.

One can argue from these observations that "who needs software
patents then?", i.e., things wouldn't have been too much different
in the software industry had there been no software patents.  One
can also argue the exact opposite, that things wouldn't have been
too much different in the software industry because of software
patents.  You can't resolve this issue by the economic impact of
software patents on the software industry (or all industries -
many of you keep on forgetting that most software patents are 
for "embedded" systems - not pure software like a sorting
algorithm or something).  Such impacts can get lost in the noise
of all of the things impacting the software industry (like the
actions of Microsoft).

Greg Aharonian