CampVald05 case study of 50 famous swpat

> An abstract to a European paper that concludes that the quality of software
> patents is little different from other technologies being patented, because
> in the end, all of software is just another technology.

I can't find the above statement in the abstract.

> either for or against software patents. The technical literature
> - frequently hostile to patents - is most often based on an examination
> of a small number of pathologically bad patents,

I wonder what technical literature they are referring to here.  Maybe
some news reports about scandal patents?

> This paper attempts to fill in these gaps in the analysis. We focus on
> the technical merits of what, on the surface at least, should be good
> software patents - a set of 50 most highly cited patents. 

[...] 

>     Are software patents too obvious?
>     Is the level of disclosure adequate?
>     Are patents real - do they represent real innovations or are
>         they strategic?
>     Are software patents too broad in their technical coverage?
>     Do software patents last too long?
> 
> We conclude that for the set of patents examined here: they are not too
> obvious in general; the level of disclosure is often less than optimal,
> indicating the need for reform; they are almost all for real innovations;
> some are too broad technically but most are not; they do last too long,
> but this has little to no apparent impact on the industry; and some
> software inventions need both patent and copyright protection. 

It seems here that, in their own words, they are making generalisations
from a sample of 50 specially chosen "good software patents".

> Taken altogether, software patent critics do have some valid points (especially
> regarding disclosure), but the accusations that software patents are
> generally obvious, trivial, and impede progress do not stand up to scrutiny.

I'd wonder who made those generalisations that they are refuting.

What people do say is that "most software patents ...", and that can
better be falsified by looking at random samples from the EPO database, 
e.g. at

	http://gauss.ffii.org/

than by picking patents related to 50 famous advances in informatics.

In any case, if this study contains some explanations of these 50 patents
(rather than just conclusions in the above style), it could be interesting.

	http://wiki.ffii.org/CampVald05En
	http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/campvald05/

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