Re: [Patents] "Further technical effect"

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

James writes:
>My distaste is based on the analysis that sw pats would (on balance)
>reduce innovation, create a much more uncertain environment for
>developers, promote monopolies, lock out open-source, and restrict
>self-expression; all to no good purpose.

I have been collecting data on software and software patents for ten years
much of which I publish.  There is no emprical evidence that software
innovation is being reduced because of patents - no evidence when you
actually measure things.  There is no evidence that uncertainties of
software developers and the potential monopolies they might face any
significantly different that for developers of chemicals, circuits,
machines, etc.  And at least in the US, there is no evidence that software
developers are experiencing any higher levels of restricted self-expression
than any other developers (such as the ability to express thoughts about
newly discovered gene sequences).  No evidence.

Software is just another technology dealing with the manipulation of a
physical object - information (that is, if you read the physics
literature for the last ten years, you will see the growing incorporation
of information into the fundamental theories of physics as a physical
quantity).  Software then is a controlled way of using the forces of
nature to manipulate and transform a physical quantity - information.

In that sense, the Nordic patent committee report of 1963 was just
anticipating the understanding of information as being physical when
they refer to the energy aspects of computer operations (since all
information exchanges expend energies).  The Nordic patent committee,
in writing that a computer program transform a general machine into
a specific machine, also was anticipating the reasoning of the American
courts in the decades to follow that shifted effective software
protection from copyright to patents.

Spend a few months (or years) and wander throught the physics literature
and learn something serious about the forces and quantities of nature.

Greg Aharonian