[Patents] On GPL Ideas and Limited Software Patentability

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

Bernard Lang replied to Ronald Riley:

> > Rather or not some people like it or not, the reality is that
> > XXXX  is becoming THE RULE.  I do
> > not think you can stop this.  Rather than spending all your time
> > railing about XXXX, you should likely be looking at how
> > you will cope with them.
>
>   I heard this speech so many times ... it is sometimes good advice...
>
> and often the path of the coward or worse ... make the best of the system,
> and forget any moral consideration.

In most case it is the speech of the sympathisers of a regime that is
losing ground and becoming so unpopular that even they themselves would
rather not be viewed as the supporters of that regime but rather as
a friend giving good advice.  Of course these "friends" are usually part
of the regime, and the purpose of the "advice" is to make us lose the one
very strong asset that we have and that they are afraid of:  truth.

There were lots of friends of this type during the age of the "cold war"
who were very keen that the West should trade some of its correct legal
and moral positions in return for the hope of some "humanitarian
improvements".  You have the same appeal to "realism" in the human rights
debate until this day.

The calculus is quite simple:  if the other side has power and you have
truth, the other side is likely to force its will on you at this moment,
no matter whether you bend your truth or not.  If you bend your truth, you
will get a few nice words from them and then they will go a head at fuller
speed than ever. If you don't bend it, you have good chances of slowing
their pace down and winning the battle a few years later.

In the case of swpat, there is a strongly entrenched movement that has
accumulated power over many decades.  It takes some time to melt the ice,
and we are making very good progress.  The fact that it hasn't been melted
down all within only 2-3 years should not discourage us.

Btw there are quite a few believers of the patent faith, especially
lawyers and patent professionals, who have a name as cyber-libertarians
and can, using that credit, do us a lot of harm. These kinds of "good
advisers" are more harmful to our cause than any outright spokesman of the
patent movement.  We are only gradually growing immune against them, and
we need to be ready to demask such cyber-libertarians and unveil their
tactics, even if that causes some friendships to break.  There was a
particularly bad case in Germany, where such people were trusted as
"opensource experts" by the German ministery of economics, see (in German)

        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/papri/bmwi-luhoge00/

-phm