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

[Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe@ugent.be>]

On 15 mrt 2004, at 18:28, Bernard Lang wrote:

> > Economics and software are two completely different beasts. Software 
> > is
> > merely a way to describe mathematical operations
>
> not necessarily ...  (e.g. equational programming)

Equational programming seems to be a form of functional programming. It 
has been thought for a long time that functional programming was more 
powerful than procedural programming, but afaik that notion has been 
deserted quite a while ago already (since you can create an interpreter 
for a functional language in a procedural language).

So functional programming and equational programming are just 
syntactical sugar, in the end it's still maths. That's why it can be 
done on a computer.

> > A description of something is not patentable subject matter,
>
> but what is described may be

That's why I said in my original mail:

"So the only thing left that's possibly patentable is what you 
describe, but whether or not that's patentable is completely 
independent from the way you describe it."

> Yes, but there may be invention inasmuch as the program is doing
> something specific with the drill related to the drill properties.
> Hence you can patent this specific way of using the drill as specified
> by the program (which is not the program itself, or "as such").

Indeed. A way of using a dril may be patentable, but whether you 
describe this method in C or in English and whether the controlling of 
the drill occurs by a worker or a computer doesn't matter as far as 
patentability is concerned (shouldn't, anyway).

> However, the program itself, independant of the drill, cannot be
> covered by patenting.  It is just an abstract object, which you can
> freely use in another context, not related to the operation of a
> drill.

Although I agree with this, I wanted to make something else clear, 
namely that you can also not make a particular drilling operation 
patentable by simply saying that it's now performed under control of a 
(new) computer program. Doing it under control of a computer program 
will most likely yield
efficiency improvements, but

a) an invention must be new, non-obvious and industrially applicable
b) since the only new thing in this case is the computer program, so 
the computer program would have to be the invention (which it can't be 
according to art 52 EPC)


Jonas