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.
>
> For the purposes of  patent protection, I agree (!),
> the form of the claim, be it wood, metal or
> some other form of matter, is irrelevant.
> Otherwise you could circumvent a patent
> just by using different materials :-)

I don't understand the connexion to what Greg said.
The discussion was not about claim forms, but about what can be protected.

Courts have held that algorithmic (i.e. purely mental) innovations were
not patentable, no matter whether they are claimed as hardware or
software.

This view has also been held by some US courts.  It was the UK courts
which seem to have, more than any other, failed investigate what the
invention was and stuck to formalities such as claim form.  This has been
so since the seventies in the UK, and it seems to be one of the reasons
why the UK lobby is most actively (and still fairly politely, just
building on its confused concepts, apparently without any bad intention)
pushing for unlimited patentability, see

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

I wonder whether your argumentation could be seen as a symptom of this
traditional british formalism about the invention concept.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
115,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/