From Bernard.Lang@inria.fr  Tue Nov 28 19:13:23 2000
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 20:13:23 +0100
From: Bernard Lang Bernard.Lang@inria.fr
Subject: [Patents] ABstracts to articles on hardware/software codesign



Greg, I agree with you.

   it was wrong to award patents to pieces of hardware that can be
mechanically produced by codesign from software.  And I agree this
discrepancy should be removed, and such patents should no longer be
awarded, since they obviously have no more economic justification than
software patents.
   If you think that, unlike for software, it is economically
justified for harware, then there must be something that is not quite
captured by your equivalence theory, which kills your argument.

Bernard


On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 12:06:52AM -0500, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
>     I have repeatedly referred to the existence of hardware/software
> codesign tools as part of a basis for requiring that hardware and
> software equally be patentable (or not patentable).  What follows are
> abstracts to just a small fraction of the 1000+ papers in the last five
> years on hardware/software codesign.  For most of what follows, you can
> simply swap the occurences of "hardware" and "software", without changing
> the meaning of any of these abstracts.
> 
>     For hardware/software, they both take similar amounts of time for
> designing systems of the same complexity, they both can be automatically
> designed by computers from a system specification, they both make use of
> large libraries of reusable elements, they both have their industries
> (which are converging), they both have open source offerings, they both
> have been referred to as "technologies" for over thirty years, in light
> of mathematical automata theory they are both equivalent expressions of
> computing models, they both have non-physical features, they both have
> expressional abstract protected by copyright and functional aspects
> protected by patent, etc.  Electrons switched by a hardware circuit are
> no more a physical transformation than electrons switched by software
> which control switchable hardware.
> 
>     To allow patenting for one but not the other is to deny all of these
> mathemtical, logical, technical and social equivalences.  And there is no
> law that can survive serious intellectual challenge on either side of the
> Atlantic that tries to treat them differently.
> 
> Greg Aharonian
>                               ====================

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