[Patents] Re: European arguing for patenting pure math formulas

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

Bernard asks a naive question:
>How doea one reproduce hardware at 0 cost, as one does for software,
>which is equivalent according to some great thinkers of our time.

You might want to try some great thinking for yourself.  First, in many
cases, reproducing software doesn't have zero cost, but the cost of
the floppy disk/CDROM for distribution,and the cost of manuals to
explain the software.

Second, for hardware, suppose built a coprocessor board for personal
computers that consisted of a giant field programmable gate array
with tens of millions of gates and tens of millions of accompanying
memory cells (read the latest ISSCC papers and you see them approaching
these capabilities).

Well, one could design an infinite number of digital circuits that
could be supported by the FPGA board that would work in conjunction
with the main CPU of the PC.  Such circuits could include designs for
signal processing, encryption, graphics calculations, etc.  And all
of these designs could be distributed at 0 cost electronically, in
exactly the same manner as the equivalent software algorithms that
would run slower on the main CPU.  These hardware designs could have
their own Open Source effort, be distributed in some high level form
electronically to be compiled and loaded and executed locally (like
Java), etc.

I can distribute for 0 cost either software which transforms the main
CPU into a machine to do a specific calculation (which is why software
always achieves a technical, physical effort - it physically transforms
the state of a general purpose CPU into a machine to do a specific
calculation), or distribute for 0 cost hardware which transforms the
FPGA into a machine to do a specific calculation.

So once again guys, thanks for inspiring yet another equivalence between
hardware and software that demands the equal patentability.  And in
terms of courts, the US courts have ruled that software physically
transform the processors it is loaded onto into a new machine.  So that
cancels out all of the bad computing logic of the German court
decisions.  And all of this flows from the work of Turing, Church and
Post - that the hardware/software distinction is irrelevant to 
understanding the properties of a digital signal process (such as
novelty and non-obviousness/inventive step).

So yes, I can arrange to distribute hardware for (near) zero cost.
SO much for that false patentability distinction.  And the equivalence
becomes complete if the main CPU of my personal computer is a FPGA
itself.

Greg Aharonian