Re: [Patents] some practical ideas

[Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>]

Peter is obviously ignorant of much outside software.  I change his words:
>A fundamental problem with hardware patents in comparison with the
>kinds of patent of which I am an author myself, is that Hardware
>Development is advancing at such speeds, is developed on such a
>massive world-wide scale, uses such intrinsic complexity in bringing
>together thousands of simple "Circuits" in a single VHDL program, that
>there is no way anyone could correctly judge if a certain "Invented
>Circuit" is new or already used by some-one, somewhere on this planet.
>Nobody can claim he can check correctly, realisticially that no
>one else used the basic methods of e.g. "Instant Signal Processing"
>somewhere before in the world .......

There is little that you can say about software you can't say about
hardware.  Many hardware patents are as bad as many software patents.
They increasingly are designed using the same tools by the same people
with the same amount of future use and obsolescence.  It is just as
hard and just as easy to search software.  A big global business is
that of selling hardware designs in software form.  If anything,
hardware companies experience more patent problems and have paid
more in patent license and infringement fees than software patents,
and probably have more lawsuits going on.  And for the most part,
Peter is clueless about the difficulty of searching for prior art
to invalidate software patents - he should take to those of us in
the US who do it regularly and get some facts instead of fantasies.
And if he would talk to such people, he will find out that searching
for software is comparable in difficulty to searching for hardware,
even when you have to go back far in time (for example, British
Telecom's hyperlink patent).

Software is as much a technical invention as hardware.  At least in
light of the physics of the universe I live in.  Maybe spacetime is
different in Europe.

Greg Aharonian