From srctran@world.std.com  Tue Nov 21 18:39:50 2000
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 13:39:50 -0500 (EST)
From: Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com
Subject: [Patents] natural forces

>On the contrary, the software industry has demonstrated a very high
>rate of development of new technologies, basically in the absence of
>software patents.

But that is true of other industries as well.  For example, consider
the other major area of patenting, biotechnology.  Much of the early
work, and much of the present work, is government funded and done by
academics, many of whom are more interested in NIH grants than some
future patent royalties.  One can argue that we don't need the 
patent system to encourage people to do things with the human genome
because of all of the government funded efforts to do that.

SO if your attack on software patents is that we don't need them to
encourage people to develop new software (which I think is mostly
true for the simple reason that most software patents are invalid
on prior art grounds because some early, and not interested in a
patent, did it first), then it raises the question if patent
protection should be eliminated for any other technical areas (like
biotech) where new developing will go on even without patent
protection.

So again I argue that there is nothing different about software.
Whatever complaints you have about software patents apply to many
other technology areas being patented as well, and therefore if
you argue against software patents for these reasons you should do
so against other sorts of technology patents as well.

Greg




