Re: [Patents] Phil Salin on Software Patents

[Gregory Aharonian <srctran@TheWorld.com>]

>Phil Salin opposed software patents on free speech grounds, claiming a
>government monopoly over the use of certain ideas in software was
>exactly equivalent to censorship of literary ideas. This was the first
>application of the concept of freedom of speech to software.

What Mr. Salin leaves out of his comments is his argument that he is
opposed to software copyright on free speech grounds as well, i.e.,
that he is against all forms of protection for software (I will assume
Mr. Salin is smart enough to realize that his patent arguments have
parallels in copyright law).  Second, Mr. Salin leaves out of his
comments that he is opposed to hardware patents since circuit diagrams,
especially in VHDL/Verilog form, are writings as well.  Mr. Salin should
start out his paper "I am against all forms of protection for technology.
In what follows, I make my case just for software patents.".  It would
be a much more proper context-establishment for his paper.

I assume Mr. Salin is against trade secret protection as well, since
many trade secrets are in the form of writings that should be free
and open to everyone.

Software is just another field of engineering where systems, processes,
methods and structures are created.  And last time I looked, all global
copyright laws prohibit copyright protection for systems, processes,
methods and structures.  Which is why American courts over the last
twenty have gradually shrunk almost down to nothing the ability of
copyright law to protect anything about software, with some of these
courts lamenting that they wish that these software copyright lawsuits
could be handle over in the patent world, a patent world more suited to
dealing with systems, processes, methods and structures.

So given copyright's general impotence for protecting software, any
calls to ban all software patents is little more than a call to ban
all protection for software.  Which is what I suspect Mr. Salin is
aiming for.

Greg Aharonian