Patents and Software

sorry for the poor writing quality of this statement. Consider reading the german original if you understand german.

The discussion about extension of patentability to software heats the political scene of Europe in these days. The two political parties argue basically about the question, whether and to which extent it is possible to partition software into technical and non-technical aspects. There is no question that Europe rejects the idea of patent monopolies over pure business methods, theories and means for expression (like human languages, scripts etc.) but it wants to provide patent protection to technical inventions.

Our produkt fiXml opens an interesting point of view towards this distinction:

Software makes the desired destinction (into technical and non-technical aspekts), especially hard, since it is formed in the desired and prior defined way by stepwise refinement of the task at hand. What's required is a clear definition of a distinctive criterion.

To find that criterion, we use the Askemos-concept - a theory free from any technical reference - to describe a framework for an intrusion resistant provider network "fiXml", which serves undeniable processes according to our slogan "computation like power from the wall plug". To facilityte embodiment of those processes we deliver a fitting software. The kernel of the latter is freely available under the GPL. We refrained intentional from takeing patent protection for it.

We understand^[1], that all objects and operations within Askemos are consequence of a business process and a priori without technical reference. Future theories could refine^[2] the definition of that criterion and proof other objects and operations as non-technical.

In contrast the physical mapping of those objects is clearly a technical achievement. Including all those (hypothetic) technical aspects of the software, which is useful if executed by an apparatus, but has no fully understood background in theory.

[1]

In the context of that network several providers offer the execution of arbitrary operations as a service. The operations are completely defined by contract -- a pure business method. The loyality with respect to the contract is constantly checked during operation by comparison of cryptographic check sums. Furthermore in the abstract framework there is no concept of physical location or interaction - these are always done via the network. Therefore all objects and operations have a priori a non-technical character. Those objects might correspondent to any object of the physical world, but they are themself of pure mathematical nature.

[2]

The Askemos concept can not map all technicaly possible computer programs, but only those, which can completely described by a selected set of mathematical theories and solved in bounded time.

more

http://swpat.ffii.org/