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

[Bernard Lang Bernard.Lang@inria.fr]

On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 05:53:45AM -0500, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> >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.

a hardware design representation in VHDL is not protected by the patent
(it may be by copyright). Only the actual circuit is.

A difference between soft and hard is the software is its own description.



Bernard

Turing notwithstanding      (I suggest adding this to any reply to Greg).

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