| Florian Weimer 2004-12-27, 5:52 pm |
| >> Unfortunately, Article 52 doesn't state that these things cannot
>
> You lost me there:
> how can something that's explicitly excluded from being covered by patents
> possibly infringe a patent?
A garden hose (the physical object) cannot be patented because it's
not an invention (after all, it's a physical object). However,
producing, distributing or using the garden hose might infringe a
patent.
Medical treatments are explicitly excluded from the list of patentable
inventions. However, pharmaceutics can be patented, and a treatment
that uses them can infringe such a patent.
The existing European software patents were granted based on the
assumption that you can differentiate between a computer program and
its underlying ideas. I think such a distinction is indeed possible,
and granting theese patents does not contradict Article 52. But I
strongly believe that as a matter of policy, software should be
privileged in such a way that creating, distributing and using it
cannot infringe any patents.
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