[Patents] Re: My personal opinion.

[epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk (Edward Avis)]

>From: Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>

>Subject: Re:  [Patents] My personal opinion.

>>I think that the incentive of the monopoly should be balanced with the
>>research work behind it.
>
>That is probably as difficult and subjective to determine as obviousness.
>Suppose I am a chemist, spending my whole life practising in some field
>of chemistry.  One day I am walking along a beach thinking about chemistry
>in general, and it suddenly occurs to me how to solve a chemical problem
>of great financial value, but a problem I hadn't been working on
>directly.

>For this particular effort, how much research work was behind it?  You
>can answer it two ways:  zero, and a lot.  Zero, in the sense that he
>solved a problem while spending no time directly on the problem.  A
>lot of time, in the sense that the solution was based on his life's
>research experiences and activities.

>Is that then grounds to deny him the patent?  I think not.

Of course not.  Patent offices cannot make subjective judgements like
that.  They need simple, clear rules which apply equally to everyone.
Of course there will be some element of luck in who comes up with these
flashes of insight.

The point is to weigh up all patents on areas of chemisty and decide, on
balance: is it economically useful to grant patent monopolies on
chemical inventions?  Taking the 'good patents' and 'bad patents'
together, is it worth doing?

Now apply the same test to software.

(Someone on this list proposed the following definition: 'if I can
download it, it's software'.  Can we use this for the sake of argument
- I don't want to get bogged down in another long long argument about
how software is identical to hardware and judges with years of training
cannot possibly distinguish the two.)

-- 
Ed Avis
epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk