From phm@a2e.de  Wed May  9 17:55:23 2001
From: phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 18:55:23 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Please stop jokeing, Roland .... ('twas: Re: [Patents] Re: On
 GPL Ideas and Limited Software Patentability)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.30.0105091736100.16217-100000@faun.nada.kth.se>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0105091828360.25127-100000@mulix.oas.a2e.de>

> Greg belive in something, Greg believe that hardware and
> software are interchangeble. This does not mean that Greg
> is an obcessed supporter of the patent system as such,
> which you certainly have understood if you have followed
> the discussions.
>
> I can not blame Greg for that view, but his view is futuristic.
> We are not there yet. Some day in the future when we have
> understood the programming language to model the physcial world
> then Greg will be right, but we are far from being there yet,
> when we are there we will not need anything like the patent system
> for hardware either but I start to merely realize that we should
> get rid of the whole patent system quite soon, because it's 20
> year time span and limited and costly protection model I don't
> consider to be efficient for hardware either.

If you apply the traditional mind-matter rule elaborated in the

	Eurolinux Regulation Proposal
	http://swpat.ffii.org/stidi/eurili/

and the world evolves in the way you describe above, then that will mean
that the sphere of patentable inventions will gradually dry up. Currently
I don't see that happening.  Although science aims to reduce everything to
information structures, this may not always work perfectly, and even when
it works for some problems, other new ones appear. There cannot be an
infinite supply of patentable inventions. Just as the ideas of music seem
to have come to a stagnation after their explosion in the 19th century,
the same has happened to ideas of mechanics and may happen in chemistry or
biology, even if reductionism isn't completely successful.

I can't see that Greg's view is all that futuristic.  It is just an
extrapolation of the reductionist tendency that can be observed, and an
obsessive fear that there will be less and less true inventions.  This is
not only fear but to some extent a fact.  And Greg is by far not the only
person within the patent world who is obsessed by it.  It was expressed in
some articles in the 70s, and it is visible in most of the later articles
that demand the extension of patentability.  Unfortunately it is not based
on a rational assessment of current development but on fear and on a sense
of drift and anxiety about the future.  Similar to that politicians who
look for spheres of "economic growth" in more and more abstruse areas or
to old Soviet Union veterans who believe they must export their
"revolution" everywhere because it's so broken in the interior.

-phm




