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

[dmarti@zgp.org (Don Marti)]

begin Gregory Aharonian quotation of Fri, May 11, 2001 at 01:35:41PM -0400:

> So once again guys, thanks for inspiring yet another equivalence between
> hardware and software that demands the equal patentability. 

You can always drag Greg's argument one aisle down at Fry's* and say
that if software can be patentable, music should be patentable too. The
question is where to draw the line.

Since the number and type of organizations developing software is much
larger than the number and type developing hardware, and anecdotal
evidence suggests that transaction costs outweigh any R&D incentives
for patentability in software, it seems economically sensible to draw
the line at software. (Naturally it would be good to do more economic
studies on this issue.)

Google search for        result count
"written in C"           178,000
"written in Verilog"         410

Patent quality and scope of patentability are inevitably linked. You
can't address one without the other. A PTO without high standards
of quality will let lawyers creep the scope of patentability into
supposedly unpatentable areas, and a PTO that allows patents on too
many types of content will not be able to do justice to all patent
applications, and will issue lots of invalid patents.

If you want high quality, you have to limit what is patentable. If you
want to limit what is patentable, you have to have high quality.

* a large store in California that sells hardware software, music CDs,
and DVDs.

-- 
Don Marti              "I've never sent or received a GIF in my life." 
dmarti@zgp.org            -- Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies, p. 246.
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/        ;(Free the Web: http://burnallgifs.org/)