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

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

>     The identity of "copyright" or "patents" is very unstable, while the
>     requirement of "IP" (i.e. grant an appropriate level of exclusivity 
> which
>     allows the originator to capture returns while not impeding independent
>     creation) or whatever you name it is stable over time.
>
> I don't understand why you are asking us to regard harmful changes
> as inevitable.  That can hardly help us prevent them.

Patents should be a kind of industrial copyright.  Inadvertent
infringement should be highly unlikely.  Otherwise you can't call
such a system "intellectual property".  "Property" implies that you
are claiming something that is specifically yours, e.g. an "individual
creation", as it is called in copyright.  Even the EPO makes this claim in
its fingerprint logo.  But it doesn't live up to the claim.

A narrow scope of exclusion, as suggested by the word "intellectual
property" (i.e. property related to features that are related to a
specific individual's intellect) is not harmful, if this is taken
seriously.

>     Subjecting copyright and patents to common benchmarking is more
>     appropriate than stressing their individual identities.
>
> That is a way of obscuring all the real practical issues that affect
> us.

The practical issue is that of having one commensurate form of property
for every field.  In the field of software, copyright is such a form and
patents are not.

I find it on the contrary obscuring to talk about patents and copyright as
if they were completely separate systems which needn't be integrated.
This separate consideration of the two is against the spirit of german law
(which, according to the Dispositionsprogramm decision and other texts,
requires "one appropriate system of property for each field with no
overlapping") and it favors a traditionalist view where "copyright" and
"patents" become ends in themselves rather than means for an end.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
160,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents    http://noepatents.org/