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

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

> I simply don't see how the physics of knowledge applies to the public
> policy of how to manage the unique nature of knowledge.  Regardless of
> whether it is physical or not, it is naturally free/libre and
> non-rivalrous since it can exist in multiple places at the same time.
> It is only public policy that is putting these limits on them, creating
> legislated rivalry.  Such legislation must serve a useful public policy
> purpose or has no reason for being there.

The legislation must not only be adequate but also clear.

The goal of adequacy provides no clear borderline between patentable
and unpatentable.

Some people here, including myself, have claimed that the dichotomy
between matter and information can be used to provide such a clear
borderline, which is also adequate, see

        http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/invention/

GregBot is trying to argue that this distinction does not work.

Although his argumentation is quite lame (see
http://swpat.ffii.org/players/aharonian/), it is certainly very
pertinent to the debate here.

It doesn't help if you try to reduce the discussion to adequacy of law
only.  This reduction seems to be a fallacy which is widespread
especially in common-law countries.  Such "pragmatism" can even be
dangerous.  At the EPO it has lead to a sloppy use of the term
"technical".  A German tradition of building systematic legal
philosophy around this term was combined with a British tradition of
not taking any legal systematics seriously.  The result was that the
EPO uses the german terminology even more frequently than the German
courts, and even less meaningfully than the british courts.

I would love it if we could simply avoid the discussion of how to limit
patentability clearly and adequately.  Indeed it should not be our task to
come up with a persuasive solution which Greg can come and deconstruct.
On the contrary, it is the task of the patent movement (including Greg and
his patent lawyer audience) to come up with a solution.  Their destructive
approach to patent policy will soon run out of political support.  Whether
soon enough for the EU directive catastrophe to be prevented is difficult
to say.

Btw the latest GregNews starts with destructive rants about our thread:

> !20030728  All physical processes are information exchanges
>
>     There is a chain of (political) illogic floating around global IP
> circles that information is not physical, and therefore that some
> transformations of information (i.e. software) are not technical, are
> not processes/methods to be patented, are not mathematical - but maybe
> expressions to be copyrighted.  A related chain of illogic is that
> (collections of) information is so different from physical property that
> the term "intellectual property" is not to be used.  Such arguments are
> usually made by people, who in their ignorance, hold in contempt modern
> mathematics and physics.
>
>     What follows are excerpts from one article, and abstracts from two
> other articles, that are just a very small sample of papers exploring the
> growing physics theories on the inherent informational nature of physical
> reality.
>
>     The first is an article from the latest Scientific American arguing
> that the universe is a giant hologram based on information.  The second
> is an abstract from a paper on DNA computing, where the DNA molecule is
> both software and hardware.  The third is an abstract from a paper that
> in all other considerations would be the report of an engineering
> experiment with potentially patentable results, except that the
> experiment is of an economics idea.
>
>     Much of copyright and patent law rests on the nature of information.
> But the nature of information is not a legal issue, but a scientific
> issue.  It is increasingly unethical for national and international IP
> agencies to keep on playing games with IP policy while ignoring such
> science, which is easily reviewed and mappable into IP law.
>
>                               ====================
>
> The August 2003 issue of Scientific American, page 59, has an article
> titled "Information in the Holographic Universe" by Jacob Bekenstein,
> professor of theoretical physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
> What follows are excerpts from the article:
>
>     Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are
>     likely to be told "matter and energy".  Yet if we have learned
>     anything from engineering, biology and physics, information
>     is just as crucial an ingredient.
>
>     [...]
>
> Information is physical - information processing technical.  Please
> stop nonsense to the contrary.  Beyond the ethics, it is just boring.

-- 
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/