Re: EPO paper on CEC/BSA proposal

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> >Referring to calculation rules as "technologies" and to school teacher's
> >strikes as "industrial action" is a way for these people to borrow
> >prestige from elsewhere.  You can never prevent that, except perhaps if
> >you create an artificial language which you can control.
>
> I have no need to create artificial languages.  Standard dictionary
> definitions

The patent context is a special one where "standard dictionary defintions"
don't necessarily apply.  As said, when the presence of two many contexts
causes confusion, one could consider coining a new word.  But that is no
excuse for creating this confusion, as you are doing.

> around the world for the word "technical" include, and typically focus
> on, the phrase "applied science", a phrase as clear, if not more
> clearer than "technical".  Algorithms/calculations/software are
> applied mathematics, and other than the few square feet of Germany you
> inhabit, everyone else tends to view mathematics as a science.

All this is irrelevant.  Words of general language can and are always
borrowed for use within special axiomatic systems, such as the one used in
the patent context.  Combination of various definitions and rules
collected from dictionaries never leads to any useful results.

> And what these algorithms/calculations/software manipulate, information,
> is considered to be physical by the arbiters of the physical, the
> science of physics (for example, what are the physical effects of
> information flowing in and out of blackholes?)

That doesn't seem to mean anything.

Probably we have here again a special theory (axiomatic world) used by
certain physicists, in which the term "information" is used to denominate
a specific concept within their axiomatic system.

That is what you always do when you build systems: you create concepts and
need to name them.  It is also what you do when you write a program.  No
programmer would conclude anything about a function based on its name.

> One of the reasons the CAFC here in the US gradually allowed the
> patentability of software and business methods is that no one here
> in the US could come up with clear enough definitions to argue why
> such technical things shouldn't be patentable.  One way of looking
> at State Street is to see it as a statement of "if you can't define
> it, you can't ban it".

I would say:  "If you can't define it, you can't allow it.  Thus, if these
CAFC guys fail to come up with a clear invention concept, then it is
irresponsible of them to allow the continuation of a patent system at
all."

> I don't see why that logic shouldn't be applied in Europe, especially
> given the lengths you guys go over there to avoid trying to better define
> the term.  I mean, it was amateurish for the EPO Board to admit it
> had no definition of "technical", but would act anyways until a better
> definition came along, WITHOUT the EPO Board exploring better definitions
> itself.  The EPO Board could have easily explored view "technical" as
> "applied science" and then examining if the pension calculations could
> be considered an application of some science.  But they didn't.  And
> until someone does, there should be no ban.

Patents are bans on people's activity.

Until the patent lobby comes up with a viable definition of "patentable
invention", there should be no patents.  We have been pointing to a viable
definition, but, well, the EPO doesn't seem to like it, and it's their job
to come up with one.  They should better build a complete axiomatic system
to support it.  Collating words from dictionaries and performing rigid
operations on those words, as if they were part of an axiomatic system, is
a typical method from Gregorian Logics which may have its place in jokes
or in PatNews rants, but even a paper such as that from the EPO

        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eubsa-swpat0202/epo020621/

could be made worse applying the typical G.L. methods to it.

-- 
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/