RE: [Patents] Linus: kernel development no longer legally possible

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> >.... but I think that if I submitted an overbroad patent application
> >.... for a general widget, they would laugh at me.  In software,
> >.... however, they wouldn't.
>
> You guess wrong.  Overly broad patent applications and overly broad
> issued patents happen in all fields of technology.

Claim scopes are always narrowed down when relevant prior art occurs.
But they can never be as broad in the first place when there is
a technical invention (i.e. a teaching of cause-effect relations of
controllable forces of nature).
E.g. you might get a patent on the way to implement a certain idea by
using hitherto unknown chemical processes, but not on the idea itself.
In computing, there is no such distinction.
Everything is an abstract idea.
Abstract ideas are directly executable on the logical device, if only they
are correctly represented in any language of your choice.

Narrowing claims by means of prior art is like playing russian roulette.
You may be lucky in one case, but there is no reason why it should work,
nor does it reflect justice or promote progress.  It just happens that
this game makes some people rich, who then use their wealth in order to
lobby to perpetuate the game.

Unfortunately we are still at the stage where the public lobbying is done
by a few crackpots whom the ruling circles don't take seriously.  Such as
a certain prior art guru who seems to be vainly hoping to sell his
services to the USPTO. The real promoters of the game are consistently
playing behind the scenes, because they know well that any attempt to
publicly defend what they are doing would only harm their reputation.

-- 
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/