That anti-patent pamphlet I mentioned

[Xavi Drudis Ferran]

El Fri, Dec 13, 2002 at 02:43:02PM +0100, Arnoud Galactus Engelfriet deia:
> 
> But surely I am still using forces of nature in a controllable
> manner, even if my use is entirely known??? 
>

Known stuff does not deserve patents. 
I'm sorry if the current standards for novelty and inventive step 
are so low at the EPO that force European patent attorneys to forget this.
 
> > If you discover a new quartz crystal that will changed phase of
> > signal by 10% then it's probably patentable. 
> 
> Ok, but if I program a DSP chip to realize the same phase change
> it is not patentable? Why? What is the difference in effect
> produced by these two things?
>

It has already been said. Because you are not offering society 
any new knowledge on nature that we may want to pay for with a temp monopoly. 

Maybe an analogy will help:

You can patent a car that flies 10 cm above the road and runs on water 
(if you can invent it at all), but you can't patent driving from 
Munich to the Hague, even if nobody has published it before, or even 
if the road is so confusing that it isn't obvious where to leave the highway. 

Applying what is already known is something that will happen without 
incentives (unless is not practical, and then we don't want it to happen). 
We should be glad that we can do more things every day with what is already
known, but that does not mean we need patents for these additional things. 

SOmehow you seem to apply the USA criteria: It's useful, let's patent it. 
In Europe we need that it's an invention, and not everything is. 

Would you patent cinema? literature? math? Why or why not?