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January 28, 2005
Noteworthy Commentator
I have just started receiving Greg Aharonian’s Internet Patent News Service email newsletter and have enjoyed every issue. I might not agree with every issue tackled by Mr. Aharonian, but his topics are timely, edgy, and tend to have a good bit of substance.
Here is a sample from one earlier this week:
It amazes me to see European software patent policy sinking into the quagmire of grossly illdefined jurisprudence that characterizes software copyright policies around the world. Computer science is a well-defined, amply axiomatized science, and has been for decades, much due in thanks to the work of .... Europeans. There is no scientific reason for having undefined terms in software patent or copyright laws anywhere. And there will be no resolution of this issue in Europe until the terms being used by the politicians are defined to their fullest extent.The saddest and most ironic aspect of this European saga is that four European mathematicians and computer scientists in the 1970s anticipated American software patent court decisions of the 1990s that firmly fixed software in the patent world. You would think that the EU would embrace these four scientists, plus thousands of more European scientists who carried on their work in the following thirty years.
He goes on to relate the stories of four European scientists who’s work foretold much of the recent software patent jurisprudence in the US.
Posted by krajec at January 28, 2005 09:47 AM
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Comments
I don't see what is undefined in European software unpatentability : Computer programs “as such” are excluded from patentability.
The problems arise only because those involved (read: living by/for) in interpreting those rules want to bend them (for obvious reasons).
Only then do they have to claim that the law does not really means what it means, that the rules are not clear, that computer programs running on computers are not computer programs "as such".
Posted by: Bernard at January 31, 2005 01:04 PM
From what I have seen, there is a huge undefined region between what are 'computer programs' and what is not.
If one embodiment is purely a software program, does that make it unpatentable? If the same exact logic were embodied as a set of discrete flip flops and other forms of electrical hardware, does that make it patentable?
I think 'software' was misunderstood for a long time because it is 'written' as opposed to 'designed' and could be 'copied.' Just by the use of these terms, software was misunderstood to be something other than what it is, and that misunderstanding perpetuated by people who seek to eliminate patents all together.
The bottom line is that software can be merely one form of a creative and useful invention. It has utility, therefore it is patentable.
One point of the referenced article emphasizes the point that the term 'software' is utterly undefined.
Posted by: Russ Krajec at January 31, 2005 01:47 PM
Au contraire, software is by far the easiest thing to define !
If the so called "invention" weigths nothing, it's abstract and pure software.
You cannot beat the simplicity of this definition, not with ill-defined "technical" aspect or anything else.
I think that software is very well understood by opponents to software patents, they are programmers after all, and not very well understood by lawyers proponents of software patents.
We write software, so we know that we do not 'write' : quotes are not deserved and I challenge you to explain your innuendo that software is not written like any often written text.(Spare me the artistic argument, everybody knows that copyright is given regarless of artistic value.)
Please, if you really insist on your strawman argument that opponents to software patents are against all patents, do not do it in the same sentence that says said opponents don't want software do be treated like mechanical devices. This is ridiculous : if we where against every patents we would not have to claim that software is special.
I understand what *your* bottom line is (nice choice of words :-) ), people (like me) doing computer programming for a living happen to have an opposite bottom line.
Posted by: Bernard at February 1, 2005 02:24 AM