Re: [Patents] Finnish organisations against CEC/BSA DirectiveProposal

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

Seth Johnson asks:
>.. did it all ultimately appear to fall into place on the force
>.. of the decision to allow business method patents?  Was it
>.. really up in the air until that decision, and was it not
>..that that decision was the one that made it an apparent fait accompli?


No.  There was a string of dozens of decisions in the 1980s and 1990s that
gradually opened up all of software to patenting in the US.  Cases with
names such as Alappat, Lowry, and then the State Street case which ruled
that there was never any prohibition to business processes being patented.

And for the paranoids on this list, the judges made their decisions based
on legal arguments presented by lawyers who equally well represented both
parties in the court hearings.  At least judges don't go around thinking
"Oh we have no understanding whatsoever of these issues - let's make our
decision based on what the richest and most powerful lawyer is arguing."

Software is all process - the expression (such as the variable names,
the indenting style, the comments) is irrelevant.  Copyright laws around
the world explicitly ban copyright protection for processes, processes
such as software.  Courts in the US for thirty years struggled to find
something about software that wasn't idea and process to be granted
copyright protection, and couldn't.  In that same thirty year period,
other courts set the terms to then protect software with patents.

The European courts are where the US courts were ten years ago.  And if
given ten more years without being heavily lobbied to incorporate 
illogic into their decisions, the European courts most likely would
have arrived at the same conclusion.

Many software patents are bad, as I argue, not because they are patents,
but because they are novel and/or unobvious.  The only thing worse than
patents being granted on these software ideas for 20 years of protection,
is to give them 100+ years of protection with copyright.

You know, some of the tactics on this list are so idiotic that there are
times when I wonder whether some of you are secretly being paid by the
big companies you claim to be fighting.  But for the most part, none of
you understand US software patent policy or history, because of your
contempt for actuall researching any of these issues.

Greg Aharonian