Re: [Patents] You have rights.. Software Patents are Illegal

[Flemming Bjerke <flem@bjerke.dk>]

Fredag 14 maj 2004 16:03 wrote Francois PELLEGRINI about Re: [Patents] You 
have rights.. Software Patents are Illegal:
> With your reasonement, as human thoughts and
> emotions have a hardware, chemical support,
> they should also be considered technical and
> thus patentable.

My argument did not deal with humans, but with computers. As long as you are 
not able to describe the physical and chemical part of thinking and feeling, 
it will be difficult to control it and patent is. But, to the extent that 
human thoughts have an expression in text, it might be possible to patent 
them, i do not know.

> One can still also say that deciding if human
> feelings should be patented is a political matter.
> With this kind of reasoning, one can consider that
> everything is political, which it is in the sense
> that one can always pass laws deciding on this. But
> it is as if one would pass laws that enact that men
> should fly : it comes to nonsense when law is not
> backed by moral or by soundness.

The sad fact is that is not non-sense to patent software. It is possible, and 
it works. (I agree that it works badly and has bad consequences.)

And probably, you could expand patenting much further than it has been done 
yet. EPO's trick: The execptions are only valid if they are non-technical, 
could be used to remove all execptions to patenting, whether software is used 
or not. You can patent art, science, business methods, etc., if a new 
technique is used. (It happens in US.) As long as technique is not defined, 
every way of doing things could be judged technical. And I think EPO will do 
this gradually. It went well with biopatents, and if it goes with software, I 
think they will go on. But, of course, I do not think it is possible to 
patent everything, you mentioned emotions. 

I am not sure, but perhaps it is practically possible to patent new ideas of 
litterature and movies. Hollywood would love it. If it is possible, I am sure 
EPO will try some day. Probably we would get a similar scenario as with 
software: Thousands of ideas are files, and because only a minority have 
economic significance, only a minority are effective.


Flemming