Re: [Patents] Greg: German semantics of "technical"

[Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>]

Hartmut writes:
>The implicit concept of "patentable invention" or "technical invention"
>in Art 52 also can not be interpreted in any other way than the EPO
>guidelines of 1978 and the BGH jurisdiction of the time did it.

Why?  Why must laws, for example these patent laws, be based on judicial
rulings made at one point in time?  Laws evolve.  In 1978, there was no
EC and WIPO copyright treaties banning copyright protection for ideas
and processes, which is what the vast majority of software is, ideas
and processes.  In the 1970s, courts on both sides of the Atlantic
were struggling with the IP nature of software.  If you read the 
decisions of the past thirty years, you will see courts having more
success adapting patent laws to protect software, and having little
success adapting copyright.  In the last thirty years, software has
become much more of an industry, much more an engineering process,
and much more indistinguishable from the research, development, timing,
marketing and distribution of hardware.

So while I am open to debate on the forms of IP protection for software
(though still favor patents), I am not about to worship decisions made
decades ago under different economic and scientific condit ions,
especially when both EPO and German courts are still being intellectually
dishonest when the rule that something isn?t technical in the same
decision where they admit they have no definition for the word technical
)something both EPO and German courts have done in recent years).  if
these 1970s decisions were so brilliant and worthy of worship, you
wouldn?t have the same courts thirty years later being so intellectually
dishonest.

In a sense, the US courts gave up trying to play these word games to
ban software patents, saying that the only objective way to prohibit
a software patent is on novelty/inventive-step/enabling-disclosure
grounds, which if properly applied by the patent offices, would see
the vast majority of issued software patents not issuing.

Greg Aharonian