Re: [Patents] "Further technical effect"

[Erik Josefsson <erikjosefsson@telia.com>]

On Sat, 17 May 2003 15:35:45 -0400 (EDT)
Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com> wrote:

> 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.

Whats your take on Bessen&Hunt?
"An Empirical Look at Software Patents"
http://www.researchoninnovation.org/online.htm#sw

> 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.

Since you seem to know swedish patentology fairly well, where is the
software equivalent of "användningsbundet produktskydd" that was
introduced in chemtech to restore the "one product - one patent"
symmetry?

>  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.

The Federal Trade Commission will soon publish a study that I hope will
correct your interpretation of data. Or maby you just have the wrong
data?

> 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).

No.

There is no equivalence between "manipulation of physical objects" and
"physical quantities". AFAIK physics did clearly detach from its
"objects" not 10, but 100 years ago, and the introduction of e.g.
"propensities" (Popper) or "Poincare trajectories" (Prigogine) are just
new answers to the usual questions scientists put to nature.

In popularized science litterature this is sometimes still not
understood (you can find headers like "the impossible is possible" when
tunneling or boson gas is explained). I have the impression you are
guilty of the same kind of mixing of conceptual and theoretical physics.

>  Software then is a controlled way of using
> the forces of nature to manipulate and transform a physical quantity -
> information.

Do I smell Hegel here?

> 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).

Hardly.

>  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.

I must have translated badly. This argument was made by Thörnroth, not
the Nordic patent committee.

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

As I see it, this discussion is rather about epistemology/religion.

//Erik