[Patents] Re: 80,000 signatures for software patent free Europe

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> We do not wish to steal other people's creative work for free - rather,
> many of us are creative people ourselves and in the course of everyday
> work may spontaneously go through many so-called 'inventive steps' in
> creating software.  And our concern is that many software patents are
> simply monopolising trivial ideas which any programmer might 'invent'
> without even realising it in the course of a normal day.  If such trivial
> ideas are patented, this is a severe denial of our freedom and could be
> regarded as stealing our freedom just as much as you may believe
> anti-swpats campaigners wish to steal other people's inventions.

This is one of the very basic issues and the starting point of any
discussion.  However there can also be really great advances in
mathematics like that of Karmarkar which for other reasons we
might also not want to have patented.

When you leave the field of the "technical invention", as it has been
defined in the EPC and in the caselaw until the mid eighties, you risk
getting into an area where everything will be either too trivial or
too abstract and broad.

The very idea that an inventor/creator should be able to have his cake and
eat it, i.e. publish an idea and still claim it to be his own, needs to be
treated with some skepticism.  Even if we dislike copycats (as I do), we
cannot subscribe to the idea that copying of ideas must somehow be
prevented.  That can not at all be taken for granted. Unfortunately the
"intellectual property" ideology that Mr. Murphy is trying to push on
British children has already gone very far, and it takes quite an effort
to try to immunise oneself and society against it.

There is one "intellectual property right" which truly deserves our
support: the right of people to keep their ideas secret. Tapping someone's
wires in order to find out his business secrets is what I would call
"theft of intellectual property".  Using patents to pressure people to
"rush to the registry" is also a kind of violation of this basic
"intellectual property right".

"right to privacy" or "business secret" is the only legitimate meaning
that a word like "intellectual property" can have.  Everything else is
perverse Newspeak.

Copyright is OK, because it is not a right to any property but only a ban
on a certain behaviour, namely copycatting.

Thus I think it is also wrong to say that copyright is a right to the
expression while patents are a right to the idea.  That is only a
secondary result.  Copyright can extend to anything.  It is not defined
by the object which it appropriates but by the behaviour which it outlaws.

--
Hartmut Pilch                                           http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation        http://swpat.ffii.org/
80000 signatures against software patents         http://www.noepatents.org/