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

[Russell McOrmond <russell@flora.ca>]

On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, 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.

  I hope that Gregory realizes that most of us recognize that US caselaw 
does no such thing in that the *drill*, the mechanical device used to 
manipulate nature, is not required by the USA at all.  Remove the drill, 
and what you have is a patent on an intangible unconnected with any 
application of natural science.

  Business model patents are an intangible method of manipulating a social
science, something that has absolutely no technical character (neither
software nor business models are technical, but applications of social
sciences), which should obviously not be patentable.  It is obvious except
in countries that seem to think that software is an application a natural
science simply because some special interest voodoo economists, lawyers
and lobbiests have told them it is.

  And we don't even need to sell you some swampland in Florida...

  You can take a generic hardware and run software on it that does not
control machines to manipulate nature and have the USA claim that the
*software* running on this generic piece of hardware is patentable.  
Because the requirement of a connection to an application of natural
science is not present in the USA, the US application of patent law is
nonsense.


<sarcasm>
Ya, I know, blah blah blah.  Electrons though a microprocessor or the
human brain magically have a technical character -- and there are no
politicians, lawyers or sociologists, and no social sciences, just
engineers manipulating natural sciences....

Oh, and gravity doesn't exist -- the flat-earth just sucks...
</sarcasm>

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