[Patents] Man Patents the Wheel

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

I wrote some word rubble here:

> Unfortunately there is such a thing as institutional decay.  Which is why
> people periodically lose confidence in the ability of governments and take
> refuge in market worship.  The market is of course a great progressive
> force smashing a decayed state bureaucracy becomes a major task of
       ^
       when

> history.

> So when you design a system, such as the patent system, you'd better
> to build it on a few simple rules to make it somewhat decay-resistant.
> One such basic rule is that of technical invention.

To make this point clearer:

We have on one side questions asked to the real world, or, more narrowly,
the world of controllable natural forces.
Any solution that is an answer to such a question will entail the use of
external material objects, so that there will be an overhead cost to which
patent licenses can be added without much of a hassle.

On the other side we have questions asked to human reasons, where the
answer is a new rule of organisation or calculation, verifiable solely by
logical deduction.

The problem we have encountered is that these two worlds have come closer
together, and the most common mediating element between them is the
universal computer.

So on one side there are people who say:  if physical processes are
patentable, why should it make any difference whether they run on special
hardware or on general-purpose hardware ?

On the other there are people who say: if rules or organisation and
calculation are not patentable, why should it make any difference whether
I run them in my head, with pencil and paper or with the normal tool of
today's civilisation, which is the universal computer ?

And in fact the second argument is right, because the economic rationale
behind not granting patents on thoughts applies also here:  information is
replicated at zero cost with not overhead to which patent licenses could
be added.  The division of the extra cost of patents against the basic
overhead is a division by zero.

Most of the above has been said many times before here.  What was new to
me is that all of what I wrote has been written in patent law text books
and worked out by leading German law courts 15 years ago.  Even the future
was foreseen and criticised by those texts.  The only reason that the
institutional decay nonetheless occurred lies in the well-known weakness
(ignorance and greed) of man.  Patent lawyers are on the average quite
ignorant about these questions, because being knowledgable about them does
not bring any extra revenues into the law office.  And when Greg predicts
that his strategy will win because it is more realistic, he draws his
confidence from this realistic knowledge about human weakness and about
the social dynamics of lemming marches.  But nobody can foresee all
factors. It is better to trust in one's conscience than in any predictions
about the future.  Most predictions are conceived as self-fulfilling
prophesies and don't have much of a basis beyond that.  When people become
anxious to predict that a lemming march will take place, this is a clear
sign that the tide is already turning into the other direction, so that
an urgent demand for self-fulfilling counter-prophesy has arisen.

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