[Patents] natural forces

[Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona jgb@gsyc.escet.urjc.es]

I'm sorry, but I don't know enough about other industries to have an
informed opinion about the validity of patentes in them. If you know
enough about those industries, go ahead with your reasoning. I'm sorry
but I canot follow it. Currently I'm interested on software patents,
that'S enough for me at the moment.

In any case, and in my opinion, when somebody advocates for software
patents, the society has the right to ask "Waht do I get in return for
granting you a monopoly?". If the answer is "nothing", I don't see the
point in even considering the idea. If the answer is "something", that
something has to be carefully constrasted and weighted against what
the society loses.

May we know which one is your answer? (mine is "nothing" or "almost
nothing"). More in general, of course we need a careful and detailed
study on those returns, if any, in the case of the software industry.

Saludos,

       Jesus.

Gregory Aharonian writes:
 > >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

-- 
Jesus M. Gonzalez Barahona                | Grupo de Sistemas y Comunicaciones
jgb@gsyc.escet.urjc.es / jgb@computer.org | ESCET, Universidad Rey Juan 
Carlos 
tel: +34 91 664 74 67                     | c/ Tulipan s/n
fax: +34 91 664 74 90                     | 28933 Mostoles, Spain