[Patents] French State secretary for Industry against SoftPat

[mva@df.lth.se (Martin Wahlén)]

> >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
> existing software ideas (and the same for business methods, which

Ok, so say that you allow this for software. This would imply that
Numerical methods are patentable. And numerical methods (such as
the Newton-Rapson iteration) is just applications of math.

On an other note, so for art. Cubism(sp?) was both new and not obvious
when it started beeing used as a painting technic, how can you say that we
should not discriminate against software (it is the same as hardware, when
we are descriminating against painting?).

Martin