[Patents] software = hardware logics (fwd)

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>
Subject: software = hardware logics
To: intprop-l@topica.com
Cc: Klaus Hundt <Klaus.Hundt@bibliothek.uni-magdeburg.de>

> > Software can be implemented in hardware but not vice versa.

> Not true, or at least misleading because hardware can be implemented
> (and functions fine)  without software. Before the invention of stored
> program computer all software functions were implemented in hardware
> alone.

Indeed my above statement was not the full truth.  We are not dealing with
the question of "software" vs "hardware"  but logics vs physics.

Even before the age of computing, German courts regularly rejected
teachings of hardware logic as not technical and therefore not patentable
inventions.  By the 70s, most of this logic was implemented in the form
which we call "software" today.

Any "software-hardware equivalence" principle is an answer to a wrong
question:  software is itself an abstraction from hardware which, in order
to be put to practical work, needs hardware.  Of course you can put an
abstraction to work in many different ways.  Yet the idea you are trying
to patent will always boil down to an abstract functionality, a layer in
an hierarchy built from axiomatic functionality rather than physical
causality.

Physical causality doesn't organise itself into complex functional
hierarchies.  From this insight, once understood, the other problems
(function claims, monopolising problems, insufficient disclosure,
triviality, sequentiality of logical innovation, paradox of abstraction
etc) all follow.

The term "software" itself is, strictly speaking, part of the misanthropic
control-freak ideology which I had been writing about earlier.  The french
"logiciel" is much better.  "Software" supposes that the realm of abstract
thinking can be split into "...wares"  that can be controlled and marketed
in the same way as the entities known from the material goods industry.
Bill Gates was the great icon of this ideology, because he realised the
dream of making the same kind of product based profits that we know from
matter-based industries.  When the DOJ started attacking Microsoft,
finally a lot of people started waking up and seeing the difference
between these two worlds and the mistake of projecting the economics of
material goods onto the world of information (objectivised human mind).
I am confident that even our judges in the high courts will gradually wake
up.  They are not stupid, but some insights took a few years longer to
spread into their circles.

We can help rolling back the misanthropic "mind = ...ware" Newspeak by
replacing some wordings.  In most contexts, the following should work

  information technology = data processing, computing, applied math
  software = programs, machine logic, logic, logicalities, information works

Sometimes it is a good idea to use the tactics of Newspeak against
Newspeak:  Let's avoid "software" and "technology". Conspicuously changing
customary wordings is a cheap way of arousing attention for a cause.
Feminists are good at that, but it needn't be done in their sometimes
rather obnoxious and half-baked way.  In any case, the ideology behind
words like "software" and "information technology" is far more inhumane
than any relicts of waning patriarchalism can be for our future world.

--
Hartmut Pilch                                      http://phm.ffii.org/
Schutz der Innovation vor der Patentinflation:   http://swpat.ffii.org/
85000 Stimmen gegen Logikpatente:            http://www.noepatents.org/

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