[Patents] French State secretary for Industry against SoftPat

[mva@df.lth.se (Martin Wahlén)]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2001, Gregory Aharonian wrote:

> >So where will you draw the line in the future?  Pierre, where will the
> >line between what is patentable, and not, be drawn?
>
> At least for software, the line is easy to draw - no software patents
> on software ideas that are not new or are obvious variations of

For software patents to be granted the patent offices must have access to
the ACM Digital Library and understand what is there, as well as other
publications and publication databases.

Also they would need to be reviewed from a mathematical standpoint (is
this simply an adoptaion of a known mathematical concept). This would
require the patent examiner to have access to a database of mathematical
publications.

Apart from these academic databases they would have to have access to
regular magazines and so forth so that they can search for stuff that has
been published in industry.

Martin