From epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk  Thu Nov 23 10:00:35 2000
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 10:00:35 +0000 (GMT)
From: Edward Avis epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk
Subject: [Patents] Economic assessment

>From: "Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez" <ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es>
>Subject: Re: [Patents] Re: Patents digest, Vol 1 #345 - 13 msgs

>>Each needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis, working out whether
>>granting a twenty-year monopoly is economically justified.
>
>This is a common misunderstanding and one of the issues why in
>general it is difficult that patents work well. The examiner cannot
>decide when a patent is good for the society or not. He can apply
>the law only.

Exactly.  You can't expect a patent examiner to judge individual
patents, only to apply the law to accept or reject whole classes of
patents.

Thus the law needs to decide on the desirability of patenting a whole
class of 'inventions'.  In the case of software, you have to decide
whether the benefits from worthwhile software patents outweigh the
losses from bad software patents.  It's a matter of opinion how many
software patents are economically useful ones, but I'm sure everyone on
this list will agree that such swpats as are worthwhile are heavily
outweighed by the mass of bad patents.  So it would seem sensible, on
balance, for the law to exclude computer software from patentability.

(I'm not sure that such a specific exclusion should be necessary, but
since there are many people who consider a piece of information and a
piece of hardware to be equivalent, it's just as well to make it
explicit that a distinction should be drawn.)

>If the law says that
>a patentable invention has "to be non-obvious" (US) or "it must
>have an inventive step" (Europe) and an invention meets these
>criterion the patent office *must* grant the patent.

OTOH, if the law specifically excludes 'methods for playing games' then
the patent office *must not* grant a patent on a method for playing
games.  You could reasonably expect the patent office not to engage in
sophistry about 'as such' versus 'not as such' :-(

-- 
Ed Avis
epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk





