[Patents] Report on software patents.

[Bernard Lang Bernard.Lang@inria.fr]

except that the reasearch money goes mostly in things that are not
patentable, such as theory of natural language structure, or
mathematical understanding of phenomena.

   And patenting discourages publication of fundamental results (on
which further results could be conducted), since when you publish
them, others will seek to patent their applications, thus depriving
you of their free use.

   I strongly believe that any fair study of the economics of natural
language research would show that IP (in general) has been more a
barrier than an incentive to innovation in that area.

  I am also confident that no one will bother do that study.

Bernard

On Tue, Dec 12, 2000 at 04:01:32AM -0500, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> Dan,
>       You and the others use sorting algorithms as the test case
> for software patentability.  Well, I can show you just as trivial
> chemical patents.
>       Instead, consider the problem of natural language translation.
> I have yet to see a really good piece of software to do that.  Why?
> Because it is one of many software problems that are not "utterly
> trivial".  You solve the natural language translation problem (or
> even just a good subset), and you will have companies throwing as
> much money at you as they did at L&H before L&H went bankrupt.  And
> you will want your many years of R&D into your natural language
> technical solution protected.
>       And any trivial sorting algorithm more than likely won't
> be patentable because of the prior art.
>       Every field has trivial things being patented, and non-trivial
> things being patented.  Including software.  This is yet one more
> criteria that can't be used to separate out software patents.  You
> want to have some - go look at the golf ball dimple pattern utility
> patents awarded endlessly here in the US.
> 
> Greg
> 
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