Re: [Patents] Software is not hardware, social sciences are not natural sciences.

[Russell McOrmond <russell@flora.ca>]

  It has been interesting, but each time I have went down this discussion
with different people I find out that the source of the limited thinking
around software comes from business model limitations.  Those who took the
"software manufacturing" path of treating software the same as hardware
tend to have a much more limited view of the possibilities of software,
including the possibilities of funding its development, than those who
understood hardware and software as requiring extremely independent
analysis.

  I feature this split of the software sector in many of my articles and 
submissions to government.  For instance.

http://www.flora.ca/copyright2003/section92.html#history

http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/copps-ndp.html ;

    There are two very different ways of thinking about computer software 
    that can be traced back to the formation of the software sector. Prior
    to the 1960's software was always bundled with hardware as part of an
    integrated device. You had a device that could do word processing, but
    it could not be easily reprogrammed to do other work. Hardware was
    obviously manufactured, distributed and sold on a per-unit basis and
    thus the bundle of hardware and software was marketed that way.

    Some time around the 1960's the software sector formed with the
    separation of software from hardware. At this point two very different
    camps were formed. There were those who felt that software should be
    treated the same as hardware, with those in the "software
    manufacturing" movement relying almost entirely on business models and
    methodologies from the manufacturing sector. Software code is kept as
    secret as possible and the users of the software are legally
    disallowed from learning how the software works or modifying it to put
    the software under the control of the user. This subset of the
    software industry was very successful from the 1960's up to today.

    Another group of people noticed that software, being intangible and
    naturally non-rivalrous, has very different attributes than hardware.  
    They felt that there was no need to arbitrarily limit software and
    software business models to those from the manufacturing sector, and
    think of per-unit royalty payments as simply one business model among
    many.



  Greg and I have went all the way down that path before.  Greg seems to 
dismiss the importance of FLOSS or "commons-based peer production" as a 
method to develop human knowledge that will be very important to a future 
"post-industrial" economy.  One of the reasons I want to clarify patents 
to only applying to industrial applications involving manufacturing, and 
away from information processes, is a desire to help speed up our exit 
from an Industrial era which I believe is stifling human creativity.

  There is also standard economic policy at play, such as price
approaching the marginal cost which in the case of software is zero.  The
truly innovative business models that will capture the future will not be
those that artificially create scarcity to counteract free market 
economics, but those that focus on ways to fund the fixed costs of 
software development and allow the marginal cost to be zero.

  I don't see what Greg and others promote for expanding patent policy to
be "To Promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts", but a case of
stifling progress to protect specific business models from competition.

  Patent policy is economic public policy, and we need to get
parliamentarians to realize this, realize modern economic realities, and
to close the loopholes left by past policy makers who did not recognize
the room left for abuse of this policy.

-- 
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> 
 "Make it legal: don't litigate, use creative licensing" campaign.
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