[Patents] the burden factor in soft vs hard

[Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com]

>Information has zero replication cost

Which, whatever its truth, has nothing to do with the issue of
whether or not something is patentable, at least here in the 
United States.  The patent system grants someone a monopoly to
incent them to invent something, but the laws for the most part
say nothing about how much reward the inventor should get - that
is left to the marketplace.  So the cost of information (such as
patentable software) is irrelevant to patent law as it is now
stated.

Now if you want to pass a law saying that people can get patents,
but can make only $1,000,000 or some other random number before
they have to give up their patent, or some other economic criteria,
fine, then the cost of information becomes important.  Right now
it is irrelevant.

And as I have said before, the medium of exchange in more and more
patentable industries is information - gene sequences, VHDL coding
for hardware circuits, finite element meshes for mechanical designs.
Here too the replication cost is zero, especially in the Internet
era.  So if you are making this replication cost argument against
software patents, you are in fact making an argument against patents
in most other fields of technology.  Which is what I think your
real motives are.

Greg