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

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

> My point is rather: Since philosophies of mind and matter (and Popper's is 
> only one of these) tells us little about why software should not be 
> patented, 
> it is not a good idea to promote that kind of explanation, be it in a PR 
> strategy or whereelse.

Nobody says that these philosophies tell us something about why software 
should be patented.

OTOH, the differens between axiomatic and empirical knowledge (the
realisation that the truth of Pythagoras's theorem can not be repudiated
or confirmed by measuring triangles drawn on paper) is valuable for
understanding the rules that the german courts and the European Parliament
have been espousing.  I fail to see how your efforts at deconstructing
this reasoning can be of help in either of the following

(1) understanding the existing rules for distinguishing technical 
    inventions from rules of organisation and calculation
(2) providing better alternatives (rules that are clearer or more 
    adequate, producing better scores on the test suite
    http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/testsuite/)
(3) building good PR strategies in the current situation.

Of course the flamewars on mind and matter will go on, and in order to 
sharpen our thinking on this we have made it a subject of the 

        November Conference
        http://plone.ffii.org/events/2004/test/

as you can see (and perhaps edit, if you like).

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
330,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents    http://noepatents.org/