[Patents] Re: Pro Software Patents = Illegal

[orre@nada.kth.se (Roland Orre)]

Dear Martin,
It seems as you have not really understood about the tree
concept yet, I will try to make that somewhat clearer.

I hope the following will help you understand that
inventiveness is tree structured.

Just think once more about the concept:
Start with a fundament, then add small pieces of fundamental
designs which can be combined into more and more complex designs
making new forks of the tree.

When you manufacture physical constructions they represent
leaves in this tree. Where you arrange your atoms and molecules
in some finite ways. A leave can lead no further to new designs
it's a "dead end".

When you consider a software tree, there are no leaves, at the
end of each fork there is a design. Each design can be seen
as a fruit, a fruit have seeds which can grow into new trees.

Each software design can generate a new forest of trees.

Wherever you cut a fork, you cut an inifinite number of new
designs.

Patenting software is therefore robbery, not only from the
rest of mankind, but also from yourself. Patenting software
is like putting most of the money you have earned into a
safe with a 20 year time lock. If you knew something about
how economy works, you would probably not do that.

Copyrighting software is like eating one of those fruits,
but each of the fruit's seed will still grow into a new
forest of new design trees. You have not stolen anything.

Now you may argue, that stealing one of these fruits
may not harm, because a patent have a limited lifespan.

No, of course it doesn't really matter if you consider
a world with an eternal lifespan.

Then, I ask you to consider your own greedyness.
You certainly want to have as many benefits as possible
during your own life span.

If you steal one of these fruits you may gain a lot of
short term benefits. But then I ask you, what did you
do with all the seeds?

As long as you have a limited life time I can assure that
you are not able to harvest all the fruits which may grow
from the trees you get from those seeds. You have not stolen
just a fruit, you have stolen a whole forest, which you
have just put in the safe.

If you would let these seeds be harvested by all the other
people over the earth, some may grow something useful,
which makes yourself benefit from a large number of fruits
grown from that tree.

I'm myself very greedy, I want a long, healthy life with as much
benefits as possible. The only way which will guarantee me as much
benefits as possible, is that I share the seeds from my fruits,
to share the software.

You also wrote:
> If the fork in your tree was motivated by the fact that someone
> could get a patent on a key technology for the area and it is
> unlikely that the area would have been discovered otherwise, then
> I agree that such a patent may be a good thing.

I will prove this to be wrong for you soon and you will not
agree that software should be patentable after that.

        Best regards
        Roland Orre

On Wed, 9 May 2001, Martin Wahlén wrote:
> On Wed, 9 May 2001, PILCH Hartmut wrote:
>
> > > This should make it clear!
> > >
> > > Anyone who is pro software patents is a deceiver.
> > > To be a deceiver is illegal.
> >
> > Sorry, this doesn't make anything clear to me.
> > Some people may be pro swpat in good faith.
> > Also deceiving is commonplace in political discussions.
> > If you wanted to outlaw that you would have to outlaw free speech.
>
> Indeed, also I don't like the concept of the tree structure at all. Is
> inventiveness really tree structured? If so, then it is also tree
> structured in other fields.
>
> I don't really buy into that concept, as I see it the motivation for the
> patentsystem is to promote inventions and ensure sharing of ideas by
> granting limited exclusive rights (what I mean is that the inventor is
> free to decide if and how to license the technology) on the usage of the
> invention.
>
> If the fork in your tree was motivated by the fact that someone could get
> a patent on a key technology for the area and it is unlikely that the area
> would have been discovered otherwise, then I agree that such a patent may
> be a good thing.
>
> Martin
>
>
>