[Patents] Eurolinux position on Community Patent

[xdrudis@tinet.org (Xavi Drudis Ferran)]

El Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 09:00:10PM +0100, PILCH Hartmut deia:
> It is clear that the attainable level of translation is significantly
> better than that of babelfish or any program that translates between
> normal languages.  Especially in patent descriptions I would estimate that
> most of the automatic translation mistakes are due to syntactic ambiguity
> of long sentences.  This does not exist in a language like Lojban.  If

I remember having heard recently in the news that some judges met in 
Barcelona and 
made a public statement about their abuses of languages (things like 
an 8 pages long sentence without a period; it was an absolutory 
sentece, a sentece in one sentence,  but was more like a punishment).
 

> encountered, the parser would report an error and it would not be valid
> Lojban.  Also, UNL is being used for productive work already according to
> a similar rationale.  Of course, even texts generated from such
> intermediate language will not attain the level of a good human
> translator, but it can be expected that they will be understood
> correctly by a careful reader.
> 

XoD
I don't want to read between the lines, but I can't help thinking 
that even babelfish could be more useful than some obscure language in 
patent applications ;op. I'll add Lojban and UNL to my ever growing list 
of interesting things to have a look at if I ever have time which as 
it happens I never seem to have because it passes away so fast.. 


> Yes.  This is of course just an example of a possible compromise.  The
> purpose was to show that there are many parameters to fiddle with.
>
I guess you don't want to be too specific in the proposal, specially 
in a subject that is not central to patentability of software, 
but do you think  that all configurations of these parameters are
acceptable ?.

> > So, they would get their patent in those countries where they have a
> > translation of the patent and simply a sort of unlimited "license" to
> > patent in those others when they translate it to those languages?.
> > That does not seem much better for the rest of us than granting
> > patents in (say) English, because unless we learn English we wouldn't
> > be able to know that somebody is waiting for us to compete in their
> > market to translate the patent and sue us.
> 
> We would be warned by the imperfect machine translation provided at the
> beginning (according to the exemplary combined proposal).
>
That's what I mean: the example may be the only good configuration 
of the parameters, not just one of many. I don't understand from 
the proposal that the combination of the two options is needed.
 
> 
> It would be a problem if people could publish let's say in Hungarian only,
> with only an imperfect Logical Language version for the rest of the
> people.  Indeed the bounty (betting sum) could be somehow a function of
> the number of readers reached: the more/better translations the lower the
> bounty.  This would reflect the public costs.
>
It makes sense, but it has side effects. It discriminates against
people who speak a minoritarian language, who would find it more 
expensive to patent in their mother language than those who speak 
in languages with more speakers. This goes against the preservation 
of cultural diversity, because it tends to favour some languages 
for patenting, and therefore may lead to disglossia (is that English?). 
Unless you mean the price depends on the number of readers reached 
by the translations, not counting the original text, but that would 
not solve the Hungarian patent problem. 

 
> > - How fair is it to grant any privilege over the freedom of people to
> > somebody in exchange of disclosure of anything if that disclosure is
> > not in a language those people understand, and therefore does not
> > really teach them much?. Of course it allows people to translate it,
> > to incorporate it into textbooks that are then translated, etc. and
> > this could allow those that don't speak the patent language to learn
> > it indirectly. So it isn't a complete disclosure but also it is better
> > than nothing. It makes sense that the privilege granted over the
> > freedom of those who don't speak that language is weaker than the
> > privilege over freedoms of those who do.
> 
> You answered it very well already.
>
But I still wonder how much weaker it should be.
 
> > - How do we define countries?. The mapping between language and
> > territory is not as simple as one state one language.
> 
> Currently there is already a set of languages whose translation is
> required by national patent offices.  I guess some people might like
> Catalan, Basque, Sardinian, Welsh, Rhaeto-Romanic, Sorbic etc inserted,

Yes

> and disputes about what is a nation could ensue.  We didn't want to get
> into such disputes, and currently they are groundless.  However, the

groundless? Maybe they're off topic in this list, but groundless?

> method of weighting the number of native speakers reached against the
> invalidation bounty sum as suggested above could provide a solution that
> would accomodate any language, however small, even beyond the possibility
> of reliably understandable machine-translations from LL.
>
Maybe it would simply lead to the de facto reduction of used languages 
in patents, which is what we were initially opposing. Who would care to 
patent in Danish and risk a relatively high sum if he could just use 
German, French and English much more cheaply ?. The only solution would be
to require translation to Danish, but if that is considered too expensive 
we could at least not let Danish people be constrained by the patent.


-- 
Xavi Drudis Ferran
xdrudis@tinet.org