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

[srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian)]

>Yes, it was.  But since swpatents came it has been dramatically changed
>to descriptions of combinations of existing business processes.

Please do not waste the time and bandwidth of people on this list with
such naive and ill-supported statements.  Sure, there are many non-novel
software patents being issued, little more than combinations.  But do
some serious research (as opposed to whining) and you will see similarly
bad patents in many other areas of patenting, especially the physical
transformation patents you find in the mechanical arts - many also little
more than descriptions of combinations.

Thank you once again for providing yet another reason why software is as
patentable as any other technology - many of the software technical effects
being patented (and in all cases, software achieves a technical effect,
despite linguistic distortions to the contrary) are as non-novel as
other technologies being patented. 

Changing subject to silly petitions about patent policy, I suspect if one
started a petition against AIDS patents, once would get 80,000,00
signatures, not the statistically meaningless 80,000 signatures against 
software
patents.  But these petitions are not logically driven, but emotionally
driven.  History is full of way too many horrors when a lot of people
agreed tosomething that was not based on logic - Europe being the scene
of most such horrors.

In al cases, software achieves a technical effect if you properly define
your terms and rules of reasoning about intellectual property.  Allof
the complaints against software patents are true for many other areas of
technology being patented.  To be against software patents, is to be against
all forms of patenting, which seems to be the true cause here.  But for
the rest of sticking to science and logic, software is unconditionally
patentable (though it would help if the patent office improved the quality
of issued software patents).

Greg Aharonian