[Patents] the difficulty of scientific reporting about the EPO

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

Why are so few scholars willing to distinguish between EPO jurisdiction
and the EPC?  Is it because they belong to the patent lobby?  Not really,
I think.

The problem of applying "scientific objectivity" to thorny political
phenomena is quite known from the German literature about former East
Germany.  Most of this "DDR-Forschung" has been instrumental in creating
wrong perceptions about the reality of East Germany, and the reasons were
the same as here:  for the sake of "objectivity" it was not allowed to
say certain things that anyone really objective would have needed to say.

This has been analysed later by some scholars.

Greg Aharonian keeps shooting at me on some mailing lists because I always
compare the phenomena around the EPO with those around the GDR.

Were the "GDR researchers" cowards?  Were they voluntarily or
involuntarily engaged as useful idiots in some game aiming to make people
forget the illegal basis of the regime?  Hard to say, but until about 1989
it would even have been deemed inappropriate to ask the question.
Everyone participating in the debate was forced to chose between
contributing to further legitimation of the GDR and "unscientific"
behavior.

It is perhaps hard for people to understand how this phenomenon can occur
in a free society where nobody is jailed for criticising the GDR or the
EPO and where these powers are not even very popular.  It is hard not to
attribute this to human cowardliness, although that also is not the full
story.

It is a kind of cult of the emperor without clothes, built on the implicit
social rule that scientists may not be polemical and that social science
needs to be just as objective as natural science.

This again may be due to the prestige of all those sciences that are lucky
enough to be dealing with controllable physical forces.  Everybody else
wants to be like them, as we know.  And that exactly is a human weakness,
which can be exploited by the established powers of all kind, even without
any direct corruption or coercive force.  Such powers will always find it
fairly easy to build around them a community of "scientists" who defend
them, while their opponents will look paranoid (in a less free society
they may even end up in a psychiatric clinic).

-- 
Hartmut Pilch                                          http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
100,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/