[Patents] regulation draft proposal: revision

[Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com]

>A "technical" process is one that uses natural forces to directly
>cause a transformation of matter.

And pay tell, what matter is transformed inside a digital hardware
circuit?  It is just a bunch of electronics flowing over a network.
Sure, the digital circuit might be connected to something tjat
transforms matter, but you can also connect software to something
that transforms matter.  And with FPGAs, you have software as part
of a process that transforms hardware to alter the flow of electrons
in the circuit.

You live in the wrong century Hartmut.  The patent world may have started
out in the mechanical (which is why dictionaries define "techincal" as
"mechanical or scientific"), and the original shapers of patent laws
(like here in the US being Thomas Jefferson) could only write the laws
in light of the mechnical technologies they knew, but that is no longer
the world we live in.  

Increasingly industries and technologies are all about "ideas", ideas
worth protecting.  I argue for their patentability both because most
ideas have functionality and utility, and also because if you force
people to rely on copyrights (which is increasingly being weakened)
they will be able to capture the same amount of protection as they
could with patents (but worse for 70/90 years) by using computers
to print out endless copyrightable expressions of their ideas (here
is my sorting algorithm in C, here it is in Basic, here it is for
use in sorting recipes, here it is with a parameter call list to
interface to Windows, ... blah blah blah).

So if in the unlikely case you do succeed in forcing Europeans to rely
solely on copyright protection for software, you could end up making
matters worse for software developers by allowing people to protect their
software ideas for 70/90 years (assuming an industry arise, and it will,
to help people print out ten billion expressions of their software idea).
Is that what you want?

Greg Aharonian