Re: [Patents] Washington Times: Internet Patents Divide Industry

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

> > The term could be turned around to be useful.
> > E.g. one could say that only an exclusion scope that it is so narrow that
> > it is attributable to an individual as "intellectual property".
> > I.e. only copyright, not patents.
>
> Sorry, but I do not think it is a good idea either.
> While we know that copyright is not the same as patents, the 2 are used
> to enforce each other in many occasions in software.
>
> Currently copyright is too broad even if widely better than patents for
> software.

If it is too broad, then it is not "intellectual property".

It's lifetime may be too long and some enforcement modalities (not limited
to copyright) may be draconian, but there is rarely a problem of excessive
breadth of copyright property claims.

> Telling copyright covered works are " intellectual properties" in the
> sense of classical property will simply give invincible weapons to
> people that try to extend the copyright lifetime to the infinite.

Only if you believe that material property is sacrosanct and
unconditional.

> Once that battle is won they will use the fact that some form of
> intellectual exclusive rights are real property rights to enforce the
> same idea into the patent system.

The problem is to get the idea of sacrosanticity of all kinds of
"property" out of people's head.  Whether exclusive control of some kind
of ressource is socially beneficial requires careful consideration in any
case.  E.g. property of real estate may not be such a good thing.  It is
at least more problematic than property of reproducible goods such as
machines.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
155,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents    http://noepatents.org/