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

[Flemming Bjerke <flem@bjerke.dk>]

Søndag 16 maj 2004 13:36 wrote Bernard Lang about Re: [Patents] You have 
rights.. Software Patents are Illegal:
> I think Flemming meant by "work" the fact that one can define software
> patenting within the existing legal system.
>
> The issues are more :
>
>  - does it work in the way patenting is intended, i.e. to support
> innovation, economic growth and/or public welfare.
>   (social contract)
>
>  - is it compatible with the traditional view, undisputed a few years
> ago, that ideas should not be owned.
>
Exactly, I did not mean that software patents works well according to the 
purpose of promoting innovation. But, probably, they work quite well if the 
purpose is to enhance the power of a handful of corporations at the expense 
of innovation and freedom.

> ---
>
> another point is that the European council wants to patent programs as
> products.  And that actually means the abstraction, independantly of
> its material representation.  That means non-material, whatever
> arguments you may have about the representation of thoughts.

A brillant point, and a bizarre example of the all-pervasive EPO-logic: 
Because software on a machine may be technique, ideas themselves may be so 
too. But, this is also a consequence of the unique nature of software: 
Exactly the same signs that express a performative meaning to a human being, 
can in a computer perform physical processes, which for a human realises the 
performance expressed. 

Perhaps we should think of computers as unconscious processes in a somewhat 
similar sense as in Freud's later works where sexuality were less important. 
The computer might be understood as an extension of (a part of) our 
unconscious processes. At least, this thought illustrates how terrifying 
patenting of software is: The best way of controlling society is by 
controlling its unconsciousness.

>   It is a platonistic entity.
>
> It is actually similar for programs as processes, but the discussion
> is more subtle.
>
> The point is that a program is only what it is interpreted to be.

Depending on its context.

Flemming