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

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> 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.

At least in Germany, courts have found aspects of software which met the
level of "individual creation" required by copyright.  You know it well.
I have frequently quoted

        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/bgh-bs90/

here.

Besides, as you know, even if copyright was not applicable to software,
that would not be a reason to apply patents.  There can be and in fact
always are are fruits of human endeavor which are not appropriatable by
any legal means.

Read the Dispositionsprogramm decision

        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/bgh-dispo76/

which has stated this in very nice and clear words.  Here again, you
already know that decision.  You even wanted to pay for us to translated
it, so you could show its lack of logic.  We didn't receive the
translation fee and you haven't shown any lack of logics in it.

> 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.

The courts have been heavily lobbied to include illogic in their
decisions.  Especially the BGH has felt intense pressure starting from
around 1990, and it introduced all kinds of ambiguous concept in order to
"find a way from the neolithicon to modern times", as judge
Keukenschrijver put it.  However, the "neolithicon" of
Dispositionsprogramm was logical while the later stuff wasn't, as they are
beginning to find out again, even if it means some loss of face.

> Many software patents are bad, as I argue, not because they are patents,
> but because they are novel and/or unobvious.

Indeed many are novel and/or unobvious and still bad.
The criteria of "novelty" and "non-obviousness" don't necessarily a patent
good.
You are treating "novelty" and "non-obviousness" as if they were formulas
from some holy writ.
Don't you have an independent source of value judgement?

> 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.

As you know, copyright doesn't apply to ideas.

> 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.

This is what I ask myself when I look at your "tactics" of reiteration.

Also, your PatNews work is probably not sustainable by mere patent
busting.

Rather than responding here I should have worked on

        http://swpat.ffii.org/players/aharonian/

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
120,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/