[Patents] natural forces

[Bernard Lang Bernard.Lang@inria.fr]

Wow ... Greg ... I am speechless

  ... and my friends can tell you that's hard to achieve


You are incredibly persuaive when arguing against all forms of
patenting.  I personally would not go that far, but it is
unquestionnably your right.

may I remind you of an excerpt from a piece of communist litterature
(according to a survey conducted in the USA) 

To promote Progress of Science and useful Arts,
----------------------------------------------
 by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive
Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

 so ... if not needed for promotion ....

Bernard


On Tue, Nov 21, 2000 at 01:39:50PM -0500, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> >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
> 
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