Re: [Patents] Patent on e-voter registration

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

GregBot iterated:

> James asks about a recent EPO patent on e-voter registration:
> >(i)  what was the technical problem ?
>
> First state your particular definition of "technical" for anyone to
> try and answer your question.  By why even bother, when you second
> question is a much better approach:

> >(ii) in an age where the management of public-key identification is an
> >off-the-peg well-understood technology, what was the non-obvious
> >inventive step in the solution ?
>
> As I have argued for ten years, novelty and obviousness are a much easier
> and more more objective way to kill the vast majority of crappy software
> patents.  I would be interested in seeing the (non-patent) prior art
> cited by the EPO for their examination of this patent - I suspect this
> list of prior art will be inadequately short.
>
> By relying on established novelty and obviousness/inventive-step analyses,
> you can avoid the need to rely on the ill-defined/metaphysical use of
> words such as "technical".

The definition of "technical" as "concrete and physical" is much more
sharp and rigid than any definition of "non-obvious" which I have come
across so far.   And the masses of trivial patents show that at least in
practise those definitions don't work.  Whereas the technicity criterion
largely did work, when it was applied consistently in the 1980s.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
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