From phm@xxx.xxx Thu Jun 10 10:25:46 1999 X-Digest-Num: 163 Message-ID: <44114.163.963.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 19:25:46 +0200 (CEST) From: PILCH Hartmut I'm not a patent attorney so I haven't read the Munich convention. I do > agree that software patents are Not Nice. However I suspect that gradually > the boundary between "temporal" or "physical" or "industrial" processes > versus "spiritual" or "symbolic" or "informatic" ones will become more and > more vague. For example, some drugs are manufactured by recombinant DNA > technology by "writing programs", even with modular components analogous > to subroutines, that are then executed by bacterial transcriptase and RNA > polymerase to produce the actual drug. A clear distinction between > patentable art and nonpatentable texts will be harder and harder to make > as technology advances. A grave problem indeed. Which makes this work very important. They (EU) shouldn't be advancing in this direction without a serious discussion. Currently their arguments are just ridiculous ("Microsoft has patents and Microsoft is successful, ergo patents are good") > I'm not sure that the translation out of any intermediate language to > natural language known by the reading human would give clear results > good enough to be legally binding, given the inherent illogic of natural > languages. At least if the document is submitted in translated form > the submitter takes responsibility that the copies mean the same thing. It could be a solution for countries like Portugal and Greece, where most patents in certain areas are irrelevant anyway. If they accept, of course. Also, having a Lojban text would provide the enormous advantage of logical non-ambiguity. > I definitely favor putting patent material on the net. The USA Patent and > Trademark Office is doing just that: they already offer a CD of all known > trademarks, some of the patent material is there already, and the system > is being upgraded to include all the graphics in the documents. They do in EU too, but the stuff is not freely downloadable, nor is it possible to reorganize it, so as to create better search routines. I suspect that it is internally maintained at a too low level of abstraction. If you really want to raise the level of abstractio to an extreme degree, for extreme operationability, you will end up using --- Lojban (or another Logical Language). -phm