GregNews: emerging trend to patenting art

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

Greg recently writes in his newsletter:

> A bit of free advice: patenting art and entertainment is where the
> patenting of software was twenty years ago.  In twenty years, the
> patenting of art and entertainment will be where software patenting is
> today.

Indeed the distinction between "functional" and "esthetic" is the last
frontier.  When EPO officials such as Dai Rees explain what is not
patentable, they usually talk about an "esthetic design on a lampshade".

However, it is not difficult to deconstruct this last frontier,
especially when

  (1) there is an organised interest group who wants to do so
  (2) you have an audience of regulators who do not understand what they
      are supposed to regulate.

Condition (2) is no doubt there, but (1) also?  This will depend on what
kind of patents accumulate in the esthetic area and how rewarding they
are.

GregNews lists some examples of what has happened so far:

    www.patenting-art.com/images/europe.htm
        Nice color images and photographs from the new European Community
        Design patents.  Once again, EPO automation ahead of the PTO.

    www.patenting-art.com/database/dbase1-e.htm
        Database of titles to patents in 100+ areas of art and
        entertainment (utility, design, and pending patents), mostly
        from the United States, but other countries as well.  The
        database is incomplete.

    www.patenting-art.com/history/histor-e.htm
        Timeline of artistic innovation dating back thousands of years.
        I argue artistic innovation is artistic invention, invention in
        the patent sense.  Feel free to mention to art historians.

    www.patenting-art.com/copyprob/cpyprb-e.htm
        Over 50+ pages of arguments on why copyright is fundamentally
        illogical, illdefined, ignorant and just idiotic, especially:
        the idea-extrinsic-concept/expression-intrinsic-total_concept
        dichotomy - judicial abstractioning - the merger doctrine - the
        independent creation doctrine - the disparity in patent and
        copyright terms - software copyright - and most books on art law
        and copyright. Such exploitable weaknesses are a good motivation
        to start making more use of patents.

    www.patenting-art.com/copyprob/softcopy.htm
        My ongoing effort, now 35 pages long, to document the complete
        and total idiocy of software copyright.  A big update of this
        paper will be available December 2003 or so.

    ....

Probably everything in Greg's argumentation is perfectly logical, derived
from a very limited set of pre-conditions which any regulator can
understand.

The consistency for which Donald Chisum, eminent US law scholar, was
looking in 1986

        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/uplj-chisum86/

when he advocated patentability of algorithms, is almost perfect today and
may be further perfectioned by in new world, for which Greg's company is
now preparing.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
200,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents    http://noepatents.org/