RE: IT World Feature: Patently ridiculous: What's Europe to do?

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> You gave me lots of material to read. I have to be quiet until I finish
> reading the material. But before I forget consider this;
>
> On this planet everything is explainable mathematically. (Even the things we
> consider very personal such as our emotions and feelings one day could be
> explained with math equations.)  This math is so complex it is just beyond
> human comprehension and we don't have the computation power at the moment.
> So any new invention that could be considered patentable is actually
> realization/explanation of  a small fragment of the big math formula of the
> nature that is being executed everywhere. Everything is already known by the
> nature in math form even if it is new to human kind. Everything is math and
> execution of an equation. Therefore nothing is patentable :-)

Not really.  The achievement of recognizing that a math formula applies
somewhere, e.g. of building mathematical models of nature, could be a
reason for granting a patent.  It is, according to the traditional german
view expressed in "Dispositionsprogramm", "Walzstabteilung" etc, an
essential prerequisite for the existence of a technical invention.

This is really a point where the minds divide and the key to resolving the
software patents issue.  Unfortunately for us, many people either have not
yet understood the mind-matter distinction (I only understood it when
thinking a lot about the philosophy of science in some university class
for which I had happened to take the time), or for some reason don't like
this distinction or both.  This makes discussions on this often very
fanatic.  Kolle was talking about "ideological petrification of the
discussion" in his great articles of the 1970s, which we still haven't
managed to translate to english, see also Kolle quote in

        http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/quotes/

-- 
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/