Re: [Patents] "Betrayal of physics"

[Carsten Svaneborg <zqex@mpipks-dresden.mpg.de>]

On Friday 09 July 2004 06:22, Seth Johnson wrote:
> People just need to hear it stated that ideal abstraction is *by nature*
> not the kind of thing that can be appropriated.

I haven't seen it more eloquently stated than:

     "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, 
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to 
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession 
of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar 
character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other 
possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives 
instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at 
mine, receives light without darkening me. 

    That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for 
the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, 
seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she 
made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their 
density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have 
our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. 
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." 

Excerpt from Thomas Jefferson's letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813, 
The originals are available through
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mtjquery.html

However, this is not going to stop any patent offices from granting on
software-implemented innovations, as long as their customers wants
them.


> Perhaps when people start recognizing (and remembering) that the
> abstract stuff isn't supposed to be patentable, then we can talk about
> other ways of articulating the policy.

This is why the patent office has chosen to call them computer-implemented
inventions, rather than software-implemented ideas. And it would appear
that this tactics works rather well, since this term has found it's way into
a directive, despite the fact that software-implemented ideas are not
at all inventions. I wonder how many politicians have noted this.

-- 
  Mvh. Carsten Svaneborg