The Basic Deception by Which the Commission is Attempting to Make Software Patentable

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By Seth Johnson.

One might think that drawing a distinction between "computer-implemented inventions" and software "as such" is merely ridiculous, because a patent on software in a device isn't limited to that device. A patent on software in a device is a patent everywhere -- because software is abstract. Making software in devices patentable is not in any way different from making software patentable.

However, attempting to accomplish this end, enacting a law for all the Member States of the European Union while professing to set limits on patenting software -- putting so much perverse effort into a deceptive attempt to codify a practice that the European Patent Office has already unilaterally begun to implement, a practice so plainly at odds with common sense -- is not only absurd, it's obscene.

The whole "Directive on Computer-Implemented Inventions" enterprise is an enormous, coordinated act of criminal duplicity.

No matter how much the proponents of this Directive say they're preventing patents on software "as such," the EU Commission's software patent directive sets no limitations whatsoever on patentability. What they really mean is that they don't want there to be software "as such" that we can presume is free of patents. They don't want us to have the presumption that we may use abstract logic freely.

You either allow software patents, or you don't. You either allow people to patent abstraction, or you don't. It doesn't matter what language you express it in; it doesn't matter that you express it in words or numbers on a page or in a file on a hard drive or on a website or in a field programmable gate array: it still translates into pure, ideal, abstract logical processes.

Everybody who uses a computer to create programs knows that it's a special machine designed to process abstract logic. Everybody who owns a computer can use and express pure logic in code and execute those processes without regard for whether anybody else might have declared that they have a claim to them because they happen to have used them in a patented device.

No. If you want to patent abstractions, then present a Directive that says so. Tell us outright that you want people to be able to lay claim to algorithms by putting them in a device. Don't tell us that you won't patent software "as such." That isn't just confusion -- that's criminal intent to deceive and defraud those you purport to represent.