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

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

Gregory Aharonian feigning naivety:

> 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.

These add-ons are unnecessary and usually serve the purpose of creating
the impression that there is a physical product.
Maximum competition makes the price of software approximate to zero.
Or can you name a constant above zero toward which it approximates?
This is what "marginal cost of zero" means.
And you know it.

> 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.
...

You are not talking about hardware but about hardware designs, e.g.
software, here.

And you know it.

> 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.

I'd like to order  300,000,000 pieces of the hardware that you ship at
zero cost.

One CPU for each inhabitant of Europe.

You don't mind shipping, do you?

It costs you only zero USD anyway.

> 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.

OK, may I summarise some important insights recently learnt from Greg:

- German court rulings are overruled by American court rulings
- When something can be understood in mathematical terms (based on
  Turing, Church and Postel), it thereby becomes hardware
- 1000000 CPUs can be shipped at zero cost
- Software replication costs are above zero, because software consists
  of books and disks
- Copyright is not applicable to software
- the fact that you can perform a regexp replacment on "software" to
  change it to "hardware" proves that both refer to the same thing
- The fact that all patents should be measured by the same indicators
  of economic effect proves that hardware and software are the same
- ...


These discussions seem to awkward even for putting them into an FAQ.
We need a separate page for "Gregorian Logics" or similar to deal with
them.  The material to be linked from that page can be found at

        http://aful.org/pipermail/patents/

Any volunteers?

-phm