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

[Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es]

As a coauthor of the report, I am obliged to replay to Gregory.

On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 01:29:40AM -0500, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> 
>     I have read Prof. Pascual's paper.  If in Section 3 of his paper,
> you swap the concept of computer program with that of digital
> circuit (in both cases programming with VHDL), this altered Section
> 3 is as valid as the original.

You are right. But that does not invalidate our argument. You are
demonstrating that our argument can be applied VHDL, not that our
argument is invalid. In that case, VHDL should be regarded as
software rather than as hardware. But if we had covered every
particular case that should be considered like software then the paper
would be very long.

> What's kind of funny after he tries to argue that all software can
> be reduced to bunches of simple concepts in a simple manner, he
> writes:
> 
>         Given the technological complexity of programming, it is
>         difficult for non-programmers to decide whether a method
>         is simple or not.

There is no contradiction. All software is complex in the sense that
it cannot be understood by a non programmer. Even a simple C program
can be imposible to understand for a non-programmer.

Note also that the paper is careful in not saying that "all software
can be reduced to bunches of simple concepts". It says *most*
software. In fact, there is a section of the paper that convers
difficult algorithms.

>         The problem is so serious that there are companies,
>         usually known as litigation companies, whose only
>         activity is patenting very simple ideas so that when
>         somebody has the same idea they demand renumeration.
> 
> Once again, such litigation companies are involved with hardware as
> much as software.  In fact, some started playing this game before
> software patents became big news.

You are right, except in the "as much as". This section is not
specific to software patents. This is not the intention, although the
second paragraph uses a software example. We use a software example,
because, for the reasons explained in section 2, the problem is
specially serious for software. This is where we disagree with you.
The problem of trivial patents is not exclusive for software, but
is more severe for software that for other fields.

> Prof. Pascual mentions a far number of "simple" software patents,
> yet in his intellectual laziness, he did not bother to contrast
> these to anything, like also mentioning a fair number of "simple"
> digital hardware patents.  I suggest he do so, and I suspect he
> will soon become as equally disgusted with many of the patents
> he comes across on simple digital hardware circuits.

As I explained above, aparently you misunderstood this section as
specific to software. I think that the title "The problem of obvious
patents" is not specific to software.

Ramon