Re: [Patents] Fraunhofer/MPI 2001

[Roland Orre <orre@nada.kth.se>]

On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 15:54, taavid@hot.ee wrote:
> Fraunhofer/MPI 2001: Economic/Legal Study about Software Patents. I quickly
> read it (shorter version in english,
http://www.sicherheit-im-internet.de/download/softwarepatentstudie_e.pdf

> It seems that answers from poll are OK, firms mostly don't want software
> patents, open-source software is mentioned to be very important and so
> on.
> But in the end the paper seems difficult to read and I didn't get the
> basic idea... They suggest that 52.2c should be deleted. And then they
> say that better examination guidelined are necessary? But what should
> be patentable according to this paper, I didn't understand... Could
> smb explain it briefly?

I glanced through this paper quickly, and I experienced it to be
inconsistent. They start well, but after a while they come to the
conclusion that everything should be patentable. This is almost like
Greg would have written it, apart from that Greg seems not to understand
the importance of free software and open source. 

The good thing with this paper is that they suggest open source
and (presumably free software) to be excluded from patent claims,
but apart from that, they suggest patentability on software (which
presumably implies patentability on ideas and algorithms as well)

Reject!         (if I have understood it correctly)

        Roland