[Patents] Report on software patents.

[Gregory Aharonian srctran@WORLD.STD.COM]

>This eliminates only true software patents and leaves even cases like
>the anti-blocking system patentable in principle.

Which means that patent applicants will gather some "experimental
knowledge" and have to pay their lawyers to include such information
in their patent applications to turn their patent into a non-true-software
disclosure.  Your proposal will do nothing to stop the submissions of
any sort of software program, while disclosing no new information to
the world as a whole, but rather boring examples of how to use the new
technique.

In fact, that is the situation now at EPO.  Lawyers are preparing software
patent applications that include enough language to achieve a
"technical effect", to be "non-true" software patent applications.  The
language the lawyers are writing does nothing to help anyone better
understanding the nature of the new software technology (which is the
main reason to have patent specifications that are enabling), but 
rather are there to satisfy these court rulings.  It is just make-work
for the lawyers at the expense of the inventors.

So as a practical matter, Hartmut's proposal is mostly a guaranteed
employment bill for software patent lawyers.   And patent busters as
well, since such proposals distract everyone from getting the patent
offices to improve the quality of their examinations so less of these
crappy bad patents issue (for me to then bust).

On top of which, others will argue under TRIPS that such rules should be
applied to all areas of technology, jus
not just software, and for some areas of technology, the impact will
be far greater (and the opposition far louder) than for software
patents.

Look, the Europeans can waste a few years playing these word definition
games, but my bet is that they will fail for the same reasons they
failed here in the US.  And you will end up with a worse situation like
here in the US by allowing the quality of the examination process to
stagnate.  Have fun.  I am sure the European lawyers are already planning
out which villas in Southern France they will be buying.

Greg Aharonian