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

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

On 15 mrt 2004, at 18:37, Gregory Aharonian wrote:

> I hope Bernard realizes that his example is what underlies the logic of
> US caselaw (such as Benson and Alappat) that provides for software
> patenting - you have to be patenting a specific application, such as
> this new drill application.

If the drill application is an invention in itself, you don't need 
software patents in order to be able to patent it. I guess you could 
always add a dependent claim stating that you do this drilling under 
control of a computer interpreting a particular computer program, but 
you can add that to pretty much every process patent and it doesn't 
really serve any purpose (it doesn't limit the monopoly granted by the 
patent in any sensible way).

The only reason to introduce software patents, is to introduce the 
patentability of mathematics, rules of organisation and all those other 
abstract things which are deemed not to be patentable. Of course you 
are going to apply them to something when you use them, you'd be pretty 
stupid if all you did with your incredible new sorting algorithm was to 
have it run on a bunch of meaningless numbers all day. There's nothing 
inventive about applying it to some real-world problem.

So the meat of your software patent, i.e. the new innovative stuff that 
makes this described application patentable, is the abstract algorithm 
behind it. Why on Earth keep up the facade of "pure mathematics are not 
patentable"? Unless you mean "pure mathematics are not claimable". And 
even that can be discussed, since if you discover a new signal 
processing algorithm and you claim it for processing sound and image 
data, you have covered pretty much every useful application (so the 
net-effect for society is that same as when you would have claimed the 
mathematical method itself).

Who cares that you are still allowed to use it to draw pretty pictures 
when feeding it random data?


Jonas