Bad News on the UK Software Patent Front

Why is there always this Jesuitical casuistry when it comes to software?

We have the following:

what goes on inside a computer can be said to be closer to a mathematical method (which is, of course, not patentable by virtue of art 52(2)(a)) than what goes on inside other machines.

But before that the same judge has said:

It can also be said in favour of Symbian's case that it would be somewhat arbitrary and unfair to discriminate against people who invent programs which improve the performance of computers against those who invent programs which improve the performance of other machines.

Well, no more unfair than not allowing physicists to patent the laws they discover, or the theorems that mathematicians prove. The point is, software is not "closer to a mathematical method", it *is* a mathematical method, or rather a concatenation of them.

All this juridical "on the one hand" and "on the other" in the interests of "balance" does not change this. The current decision is seriously bad news, because it opens the door to even more weaselly patent applications that contort themselves into the magic position to gain the favour of whichever Jesuit is on duty that day.

As a result of which, new software becomes much *harder* and more expensive to write - even to the point of impossibility, if patent thickets get too thick. Hardly what the great and glorious patent system is supposed to do, is it...?

Trop de Tropes

Sigh:

the world is not so simple as “open” or “closed.” Most software has both open and closed elements, and thus falls along a linear spectrum of being more open or more closed (or proprietary). But politicians, we know, will often eschew nuance and speak in simple rhetoric. And what rhetoric it is! No citizen should be forced or ENCOURAGED to choose a “closed technology” — this is more befitting of the Free Software Foundation or any NGO, just not a government’s chief antitrust official.

The point is that openness is not a business model: it is an engineering model. It benefits everyone: users, developers, suppliers. Kroes was (rightly) advocating such a level playing field, since it allows everyone to compete on the same terms - something that closed technologies do not.

This trope of openness being "just another business model" is a favourite of Microsoft's, alongside "we need more than one standard for a given area, to promote choice" - when what are needed are *implementations* of a single standard. These rhetorical siblings are rather desperate, if amusingly Jesuitical, attempts to use words to gloss over the reality.