From orre@nada.kth.se  Wed May  9 18:21:39 2001
From: orre@nada.kth.se (Roland Orre)
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 19:21:39 +0200 (MET DST)
Subject: Please stop jokeing, Roland .... ('twas: Re: [Patents] Re: On
 GPL Ideas and Limited Software Patentability)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0105091828360.25127-100000@mulix.oas.a2e.de>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.30.0105091904580.16217-100000@faun.nada.kth.se>

Thanks for pointing this out Pilch.
As I understand it is dangerous of me expressing me the way I did,
as it can certainly be mis-understood, but I had never thought
about that view.
Of course, the number of patentable inventions will not "dry up"
instead it will go to infinity, for me that was obvious.

What I mean, software can not be patentable because software
represents a "perfect world". Any attempt to patent something
in this perfect world will strike too wide and cause harm because
you cut away a fork of infinitely many possibilities.

If you should be able to patent something it is the "leaves" in
this tree, but not the "forks". Considering software there are
no "leaves", so software is not patentable.

	Roland

On Wed, 9 May 2001, PILCH Hartmut wrote:
> > 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
>
>
>
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