Eleventh hour patent wisdom
As the second reading of the proposed software patents directive by the European Parliament draws near, free software activists are staging last-stand conferences and demonstrations and some very useful conclusions are emerging from eleventh hour public deliberations.
After the conclusions of UK Patent Office workshops held around Britain were published last week, which found the proposed directive ” ambiguous and too liberal“, the paralegal site Groklaw took a shot at rewording the issue, since, as Rupert Goodwins explains, this is at heart an ontology problem, as much as anything else:
One of the things that came to light during the workshops was that while the concepts under discussion needed tight, unambiguous and accurate definition, actual and proposed legislation was imprecise and unclear. Some of this was due to two highly technical professional groups attempting to converse in their mutual second language – plain English – but both lawyers and software writers found that everyday ideas are remarkably hard to pin down. In particular, the answer to the UKPO’s question “Should software be patentable?” was often “What do you mean by software?”.
Let’s hope that wisdom and understanding doesn’t arrive too late to that party…
In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding — symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power.
–Lecture to the Arrakeen War College by The Princess Irulan (Frank Herbert, The Children of Dune)
