[Patents] No point in everybody agreeing in a discussion

[srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian)]

>..... So no reason to allow its extension to logical innovations, where
>evidently these unsolved problems are even more detrimental.

But you are assuming that the patent system has to be "extended" to
handle software patents, whereas I argue that software patenting is
implicitly already assumed to be a part of the patent system.  That
is, I believe any application of software achieves a technical effect,
no matter how you formally define "technical effect".

In a sense, I believe the "computer program" clause of 52.2.C to be an
accident of law based on a incorrect understanding of software, rather
than a declaration (based on some formal logic) that software is
somehow inherently different that it might to have the patent system
extended to it.

For many embedded systems, software is little more than what some
computer program hardware/software codesign tool figured would be
more economical to not burn into hardware in a new system being
designed.  It is an economic choice made by a computer program. If
the hardware aspects so chosen by the computer program are 
patentable, then so to should be the software aspects, especially
if the system is burned into field programmable gate arrays, where
the hardware/software distinction is increasingly meaningless.
So to say one set of economic choices made by a computer program
is patentable (the hardware), while the complementary set of
economic choices made by a computer program (the software) is
not patentable, seems completely arbitrary and inequitable 
application of patent laws.

Greg Aharonian