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

[Luuk.van.Dijk@xs4all.nl (Luuk van Dijk)]

On Sun, 17 Jun 2001 19:39:47 Gregory Aharonian wrote:

[SNIP]
 
> 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

[SNIP]

> 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. 

Talk about waste of bandwith... a FAQ with the most frequently ventilated
opinions on this list wouldn't be a luxury.  For one thing, Greg could
just include a pointer to the paragraphs devoted to his mantra's in his
replies here, and others could read all the usual replies that follow :-)

Warning: i will probably waste some time and bandwith in the rest of this
mail.  better stop reading now.

> 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 then again, if you started a petition /in favour/ of swpats, you probably 
wouln't
reach 8000.  Why not try?

> 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.

common fallacy:  Having ghastly horrors in your history comes
with being the center stage of history, which happened to be Europe
for the larger part of the perviouw millenium.  I'm quite confident the US 
will catch up within a century.  The US legal system will be a big help there.


> 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).

In all cases, automobiles that approach from the left are physically 
indistinguishable
from ones that come from the right, as the classical laws of physics (and
also the quantum ones to a high degree) are invariant under point reflection
in the origin of the coordinate frame.  

Therefore it logically and scientifically follows that the law may not and
cannot distinguish between cars coming from the left and cars coming from
the right in deciding which one has to yield at a crossroads. Stating that
cars from the left have to yield means that cars from the right have to
yield as well, so this would be absolute nonsensical law making.

Furthermore, it follows that, since cars from the left are so similar to
cars from the right, they must be absolutely identical in every way. In
fact it logically follows that there can be only 1 car, since they are all 
identical,
so we don't need proper traffic laws at all, just allow that one car to go
wherever it wants.

I'm pretty glad IANAL.

Luuk van Dijk