Re: [Patents] how far will they go ?

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

> > There is no limit to how far the Council wants to go.  Try to propose a
> > rules that clearly excludes any economically interesting subject matter
> > from patentability, and you can be sure they will be against that rule.
> 
> Well, it depends on who is ecnomically interested, and how. :-)

"All practical solutions", as explained in

        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/jwip-schar98/

or, in US terminology, "anything useful".

This excludes esthetic creations but not much more.  And as we know from

        http://www.patenting-art.com/

the latter exclusion is also not really stable.  What makes it fairly 
stable is probably not some doctrine but the fact that patents on esthetic 
creations are not really worthwhile because they would usually be too 
narrow and avoidable without much pain.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
330,000 votes 3000 firms against software patents    http://noepatents.org/