[Patents] A comment on Prof. Pascual's paper

[Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com]

>Even if "hardware patents" were equally bad in their consequences,
>politicians would still be free to distinguish.

Not necessarily true.  I suspect there is some provision in TRIPS
that would force politicians in any country to treat both equally.
And I doubt that in their enabling legislation, they could come up
with some non-arbitrary way to distinguish the two that wouldn't
force the software rules to automatically be extended to a large
amount of the hardware patents.

Indeed, here in America, the licensing of hardware designs ("IP
cores" as they are referred to) is a $500,000,000 a year business,
some of which are patented, and all of which are represented in
computer representation language like VHDL or Verilog.  Under any
legislation, the hardware designs would be designated as
computer programs subject to the software rules.

Greg Aharonian