[Patents] regulation draft proposal: revision

[PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de]

> > You live in the wrong century Hartmut.  The patent world may have started
> > out in the mechanical ...

You live in the 1970s, Greg.

At that time, people like Zipse in Germany accused judges who refused to
software patents, considering them non-technical, of "being stuck in the
mentality of the 19th century".

Gert Kolle, in his beautiful 1977 article, wrote that judges should take
this allegation as a praise, since it cannot be the job of a judge to
decide that the patent system must be "modernised" to account for the
convergence between mathematics and technology that is taking place and
gradually turning more and more fields into cultural techniques whose
monopolisation would create problems unparalleled in the conventional
purely technical field.  Kolle accused those who ask judges to "modernise"
the patent system in that way to "naively or on purpose" advocate the
installation of dangerous power concentration and said that software
algorithms should belong to a public domain.

This article, unfortunately still available only in German, is really
far-sighted modern.  It is as if Kolle had anticipated the rise of
free/opensource software years before the GNU manifesto.  What you argue,
Greg, is really old.  Maybe even older than Jefferson, as Bernhard pointed
out.

-phm