[Patents] Re: Software Patents

[Bernard Lang <Bernard.Lang@inria.fr> (Bernard Lang)]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 10:20:44PM +0200, PILCH Hartmut wrote:
> > I have been watching the postings on this matter with great interest - I
> > have found it quite ironic that whilst many lawyers are trying to change
> > things (not necessarily for the better, granted), so many of the German 
> > Ope\
n
> > Software contributors have been harking back to legal history in the shape
> > of decisions handed down in the mid-70; this shows a serious failure to
> > appreciate normal evolutionary processes in law.
>
> many evolutions are aberrations that need to be corrected.
>
> > (1) If Open Software groups are really serious about stopping software
> > patenting then, subject to what I say below, they will have to tackle the
> > law as it is now, not twenty-plus years ago;
>
> We are tackling the law as it is.
> Certain groups of lawyers have deviated from it in a way that was
> anticipated by the Dispositionsprogramm decision and by law textbooks in
> the 80s, see

Hartmut,  who are you responding to ?

there is apparenlty another list involved ... which I do not receive,
and refuses my mail.

BTW  I just read a paper about anti-commons (in biomedical research)

and I am wondering ...

  according to our friends, I guess that a compiler optomization technique,
or a garbage collection technique (memory management with free allocation)
would be patentable  (am I right ... ?)

  Given the extremely high interdependance of the successive
improvement (sequentiality), given that when applying for patents you
keep things secret for about 18 months, I just do not see how the
level of innovation that I have been following in conferences for 30
years (that was my field) could have been sustained.
   I am really surprised no one analyzed it ... all the data is there.
Take the published papers and public reports.  Look at the
dependencies, and the time elapsed.  Look at the necessary
experimentation, with the techniques of others.  Many of the
experiemental results came from freely distributing academic systems,
which would not have been possible with patented components ...

  We had immense technical progress that would have been considerably
slowed down, and might be missing at this time to handle the new
programming task imposed by ICT evolution, on wich current economy is
based.

  The pro-patent lobby has not been doing its homework ...

bernard



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