[Patents] monopoly/publicity contradiction?

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

On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 09:21:51AM +0000, Steve Probert wrote:
> I'm not sure that I understand your point here.  The whole purpose of
> the patent system is to give the public access to every invention for
> which a patent is granted.  However, giving the public access to the
> knowledge does not include the right to commercially exploit another
> person's intellectual property.

I think that I have to agree with Steve in this point. In my opinion
this thread is missing the point about software patents. Although,
as Pilch says, there is some contradiction between the lack of right
to use the invention, and the right to publish about the invention,
this is not a problem that cannot be solved. This is not the real
and important issue about software patents.

My disagreement with software patents is the philosophy of most patent
offices. For me, a patent should be granted only when there the
research needed for the invention is expensive, so that said research
would not be posible without the incentive of the monopoly. By
contrast, the opinion of patent offices seems to be that the inventor
 should somehow have natural right to monopoly. They seem to think
that the invention is intrinsically a very difficult process and that
all incentive to it is small (I would like to hear Steve's opinion). 
By contrast, the invention of a method to solve a problem is part
of the daily work of a programmer.

Let me show a quote from Todd Dikinson, head of the US Patent Office.
Taken from a debate about business patents
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/patents/2000/10/23/isoc.html?page=2

        I brought one [a patent example] today that was issued by the
        U.S. Patent Office in 1867. And, it is a hotel registry book. This is
        the entire claim: "A hotel registry book with the margin of its leaves
        occupied by advertisements" substantially as described in that
        drawing, which looks suspiciously like, if you turned your browser to
        the right too long today and went to a commercial site, what you'd
        find.

Do you see my point? To him, "A hotel registry book with the margin of
its leaves occupied by advertisements" is an original invention that
deserves the patent. But most important, look at the last sentence.
Although he does not pretent to show that the look of commercial web
sites is posible thanks to that patent, the sentece shows a mentality
that overstimates how people are imitating one another.

Probably the most important problem here is communication between
non-programmers (lawyers, patent officials and so on) and programmers.
It is probably very difficult to convince the former about what kind
of things are easy for programmers, such as having ideas, and what kind
of things are difficult and time consuming.

Ramon