[Patents] Re: Patents digest, Vol 1 #345 - 13 msgs

[Edward Avis epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk]

On Wed, 22 Nov 2000 patents-request@liberte.aful.org wrote:

>From: Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>

>Subject: Re: [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.

One could argue that.  It is of course possible that the benefit to
society from biotechnology patents does not outweigh the disadvantages.
Personally I think that is much less likely to be the case for
biotechnology (which has high R&D costs, high overheads, and is not
already protected by copyright) than for software.  But no doubt some
people are discussing this.

>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.

Each needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis, working out whether
granting a twenty-year monopoly is economically justified.

In this respect, there is nothing different about software.  It needs to
have a cost-benefit analysis in the same way as any other area.  But
that doesn't mean that you will reach the same conclusions.

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