[pp.int.general] philosophy vs. action

[David Arcos]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Andrew Norton <
andrew.norton at pirate-party.us> wrote:

> Reinier Bakels wrote:
>
>> Totally agree.
>>>
>>> There are more "pirate" issues, though:
>>> * software patents
>>> * privacy violations: CCTV cameras everywhere, RFID tags in ourselves
>>> * freedom/security balance
>>> * etc
>>>
>>> So we need a "philosophy", which is supposed to be the Manifesto.
>>> The Manifesto needs to address all (or most of) the main core issues, in
>>> a way that we all agree.
>>>
>>> When we have the manifesto, we will be able to fight back the copyright
>>> lobby and all the other menaces to our freedoms.
>>>
>>
>> OK ,we are getting close now. To play the devils advocate:
>> * Doesn't someone who contributes a brilliant trick for building software
>> have the "human" right of a software patent? It is his (her) labour and
>> creativity, anyhow ...
>>
>
> I'm an engineer by education. I hold (co-hold) a physical patent, on a
> design of safety horse stirrups for disabled people. It's due to expire
> soon, and I've basically covered my costs to my satisfaction. This is one
> thing where myself and the Swedish party diverge, for instance. They want to
> abolish patents, doing so only would mean that I would never have sold my
> patent, I'd have to sell the items myself, and as soon as I've sold one to a
> competitor, they can, if they're bigger, make them quicker and cheaper than
> I (economies of scale).
>
> Patents are useful in some ways, just misused at present. There is,
> however, to me, a difference between tangible items, and non-tangible. That
> could be my engineering background colouring that though, and I'll freely
> admit it (I'm from an engineering family, my father did his apprenticeship
> at Lucas, working on the then-new concord fuel systems).
>

I was talking about "software" patents. They are very, very different from
industrial patents. In fact, in each field the patents have different rules.
I can only talk about the software patents, because they're the only ones I
know.

With your industrial patent, you patented a device. That's fine.
With software patents, they want to patent ideas! Since algorithms are
unpatentable (maths are unpatentable), they just started patenting whatever
idea they had: double click, hiperlinks, networking, backups, etc.

In industrial patents, you have previous art. You have to show a "working
prototype", so nobody can patent a "perpetual motion machine". In software
patents... well, they have patented worse things.
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