[i]t is impossible to set an objective standard which can be consistently applied to determine the "inventiveness height" or so. In nearly all cases, patent examiners are not skilled practitioners in the field.
I think we do have a reasonable standard here in the US (nonobvious to a skilled practitioner in the field), it's just not being applied.
We have exactly the same standard in Europe (for assessing the "inventive step". However, as Reinier Bakels (a law scholar who wrote a study on software patents for Committee of Juridical Affairs of the European Parliament) once wrote in a mail (translation from Dutch, the caps were also in the original post):
"The law clearly says that inventions must be "non-obvious to a person skilled in the art". If you take those words literally, than that is a VERY LOW threshold: this "person skilled in the art" doesn't mean anything, of course you don't go from a layman's point of view, and obvious does mean obvious! I have even once heard the reasoning: if an invention is new (another requirement for patentability), then CONSEQUENTLY it is "not obvious", otherwise it would have been invented already! The law is only a split hair away from literally stating that trivial patents are allowed. Another illustration of the fact that the directive does not change anything to a recognised weak point of the patent system."
I believe that in the US, there is no separate novelty requirement, but the end result is the same. You simply cannot say it must be "very" non-obvious, or "how skilled" in the art the person must be. You have to have a consistently applicable rule, otherwise you're going to get appeals and maybe even lawsuits to no end from applicants who feel their "person skilled in the art" was too skilled compared to the one that assessed someone else's patent.
I'm a firm believer that the patent system continues to have an overall positive effect.
But appart from anecdotical evidence, do you have any data to back this up? Even in the fifties, there were already doubts about this. You probably have heard this quote already, but if you haven't: in a study for the US Congress, Fritz Machlup said back then:
If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it.
So he's saying the overall effect was considered to be bad, but that you can't just take everyone's patents suddenly away, so you have to keep it. That's different from extending it towards new fields (such as software) though.
Furthermore, this example illustrates that patents can help protect the small guys when they go up against the big guys. I've never understood why so many people think of patents (and copyrights) solely as weapons of the megacorps.
At least here in Europe, we do not consider copyright to be a weapon of the megacorps, on the contrary.
(Maybe because of the cost of securing and defending a patent? That seems to be a general problem with the legal system here, not the patent system.) Sure, patents are often wielded by the big guys, but could little guys go against megacorps without such tools?
The cost is certainly a very important aspect. Whether it's due to the legal system or something else is not very relevant: it's the reality in which we live and how the system works. Many proponents of software patents often say "if we would have an ideal examination procedure which would get rid of all bad software patents, then they would have a good effect".
That may be so (although even that is debatable), but t
I guess I don't understand the EU proposal regarding software patents. Here in the US, there is no specific regulations regarding software in regard to patents. Some inventions are accomplished using software. Patentability (in theory) is based on novelty, originality, etc.
There's also the very important concept of "patentable subject matter", i.e. whether or not it potentially could be patentable at all. Although in the US this concept has been widened to "everything made by man under the Sun", this still excludes some things (like e.g. laws of nature). In Europe, there are more exclusions (see below).
Admittedly, we have some problems with trivial things being patented, which in turn set precedent that led us down this spiral.
The problem with trivial patents is basically inherent to the patent system. "Non-obvious" does not mean the same in patent law as it does in real life. It's basically an extended novelty test: novelty checks whether or not what you claim to be your invention has already been published somewhere or not, non-obviousness tests whether it isn't a literal (and then I mean really "literal") combination of published things.
The reason is that it is impossible to set an objective standard which can be consistently applied to determine the "inventiveness height" or so. For the patent office, it is however very important to have such a standard. Patent officials know this, see e.g. this discussion between a deputy director of the UKPTO and a programmer. There is nothing you can do about this without overhauling the entire way patent law works, and people are very reluctant to do this. You cannot "fix" it by improving examination.
Now, traditionally, it has been assumed that despite its flaws, the patent system had an overall positive effect. If you patent a trivial improvement to a hammer (e.g. a hook at the bottom to you can hang it onto a wall), this patent could have little value (because people may be able to work around it easily, or because no-one would be interested in your improvement).
Since software is pure mathematics (all a computer can do is compute), patenting improvements in software itself is patenting math improvements (when this math is interpreted by a computer). Pretty much all math improvements are trivial by design. The whole mathematical system is built that way. And patenting one improvement blocks a whole lot of other people. Someone even made a theoretical proof using lambda calculus showing that because of this, several assumption made about the patent system simply are not true for software.
From your description, it sounds like the EU has a similar set of criteria. So what is the proposal regarding software patents?
In Europe, currently there are 4 requirements for patentability: you have to have an invention (patentable subject matter) and this invention must be new, non-obvious and industrially applicable. One by one:
invention: since you don't know what will still be invented, you can't positively define what an invention is. Therefore, they have adopted a negative definition, i.e. a list of things that are not inventions. You can find the list in Article 52(2) of the European Patent Convention (EPC). Among others, the list of exclusions includes mathematical methods, rules for performing mental acts and computer programs.
Novelty: not yet published anywhere
Non-obviousness: not a literal combination of other published things
Industrially applicable: you can make money with it.
Now, in article 52(3) of the EPC (on the same page), they say that the exclusion of those things being inventions only applies to those things "as such". This originally meant that if
Yes, there are lots of trivial software patents. But that wasn't my point. There are also lots of technical patents that are implemented in software, such as DSP algorithms for processing sensor data in medical devices.
A DSP algorithm is pure maths. That's only technical if you take the definition of technical from the EPO: in that case, processing "image data" suddenly renders a mathematical function technical.
My point was that the original wording implied that the patents are intended to protect non-technical inventions. I found that surprising. I suspect that they are intended to protect inventions (as other patents), but that there's a reporting bias that assumes all software patents are non-technical.
One does not need patents on "computer-implemented inventions" to keep real inventions patentable when they are described using software. A computer program is just an instruction manual in a language that can be interpreted by a machine. A computer program executed by a computer that steers lab equipment to perform a chemical reaction, is functionally identical to a technical manual describing the same thing.
Even though the chemical reaction could be patentable, the technical manual can't be and publishing it cannot constitute a patent infringement. Additionally, the fact that the chemical reaction is described using words in a book does not make the reaction itself unpatentable.
Consequently, similar rules were made for patentability regarding software in the European Patent Convention (EPC) of 1973: achievements described using software may be patentable, but the fact that software is used to describe them does not have any influence on their patentability, and the software itself is not patentable either
One only needs software patents (or patents on "computer-implemented inventions" as defined by the Commission proposal) in order to be able to patent achievements which are currently
npatentable, such as mathematical algorithms and business methods. Along with computer programs, these are all achievements which are currently excluded from patentability by the EPC. Software patents are used to get around these exclusions, in direct contradiction with the law.
My bottom line is: whether or not you do something using software should be completely independent from whether or not it is patentable subject matter. If a mathematical algorithm is not patentable when described in plain English (in the sense that you cannot infringe on a patent if you do that), then why should it be patentable if it is described in C or assembler?
Note that the fact that you do something in software and you patent that, does not make the result a software patent. I mean, controlling a weaving machine is obviously always done using computers nowadays. If you find a new positioning of the blades so they can cut threads more easily, and all you have to do for that is change the value of one variable in the program, then a patent on this is not a software patent.
After all, your achievement is finding how the blade has to be positioned, not the software itself. In case of a DSP algorithm, the achievement is the mathematics, which are not patentable. The only thing that automagically makes it patentable, is the fact that it's implemented in software (because a computer suddenly makes everything technical).
When I called the Council secretariat a few weeks ago to ask some questions about the procedure, the person responsible for this dossier told me they were just busy doing some final juridical-linguistic checking and then it was good to be approved. It would surprise me if this final formal checking would suddenly take two more months.
Check out European patent EP0,129,439. This is the European version of the infamous "gif" LZW patent that was enforceable in Germany, France, Britain, and Italy until June of this year.
We actually made a whole webshop of such examples, but your "that was enforceable" phrasing is very misleading.
It was most likely enforceable in the UK, as there the courts generally do uphold software patents. The highest court in Germany traditionally nullified most software patents in court cases however, though the last few years some exceptions have occurred. I don't know the case law of Italy and France regarding software patents.
I do know that for example in the Netherlands, no one has ever even tried to enforce a software patent in a court however. So claiming that a directive which clearly makes software patents always enforceable simply "harmonises the status quo", is definitely not true. If something is codified, it's at a best a snapshot of the case law of a few courts from yesterday.
Well, if profits are your motivation, then all patents, copyright laws, trademarks and registered designs are a good thing.
That's not true. Software patents only help you profit if
you don't sell any software yourself (so you can sue people, but they can't countersue you)
or if you have a large enough patent portfolio to force everyone (except those from point 1) into cross-licensing agreements
If you are a regular small company which writes and sells software, you don't belong to either category and you're screwed. Coincidentally, such companies provide for 80% of employment in the IT sector in Germany and 60% in Belgium. It's probably similar in the rest of Europe.
Software patents are a reality, whether you and me want them or not.
They're not in Europe.
There is too much money on the pro side for software patents to go away,
There's also a lot of money to be lost on the other side for them to be introduced in Europe. In fact within about a week, you'll see a large campaign against software patents in Europe (carried by multinationals) being started.
so stop dreaming. Better start thinking of ways to deal with the situation.
Actually you'd better wake up to the real world, instead of believing you are one of those "realists"...
There's however something special about this one. The magic word "PriceWaterhousCoopers" (try saying it quickly 10 times!) opens a lot of ears which remain deaf in other cases.
That doesn't mean it stifles innovation, in the sense that it doesn't prevent other people from innovating. Besides, the fact that something is open source does not automatically mean that it's usable in other programs as well (e.g., it may be written badly or completely intermingled in the host application).
You think wrong. Copying (source or object code) is covered by copyright. Patents apply even if you developed something entirely on your own in a remote cave on a desolate island. No distinction is made between software and other things in US patent law. Reverse engineering has nothing to do with patents either, that's covered by copyright as well (and at least in Europe is explicitly allowed for interoperability purposes, I don't know about the US).
The agreement is not about copyright as far as I can see. That's also quite logical, otherwise Sun would be allowed to pirate all the Microsoft software it wanted. Patents and copyright are two completely different and unrelated things. The point of the covenant is exactly to allow the companies to use each other's patent portfolio's, so whether it would be done blatantly or not is irrelevant as well.
The fact is simply that for some reason, Open Office was not included in the covenant (either because Microsoft insisted on this for some reason, because Sun didn't care enough for some reason or a combination of the two).
Not to mention, RMS suggests that one must constantly search one's software for potential infringements. Does anyone really think this is how reality works??
No, and I'm quite sure RMS is aware of that as well. The reason it's not how reality works, is that it's completely unfeasible to do so. Large companies count on their defensive patent portfolio to be able to get a cross licensing deal should they get notified of infringing someone else's patent, and small companies count on not being noticed. After all, if you check whether you infringe patents, you may even be convicted to pay treble damages in court because of willful infringement.
The fact that this kind of ostrich strategy is the only feasible one, is one of the signs that the system is not working.
When someone notifies you of infringement, you check it out, and decide whether you want to avoid it, go to court, or license the patent
An average court case to invalidate an invalid patent costs US$ 1,500,000 to US$ 2,000,000. Many small companies can't "decide" to go that way. Avoiding is also often quite difficult, since many software patents are basically patents on the simple fact that you do something (selling via the internet, distributing video data over a network,...), with very little if any details on how. In general, you don't have to reverse-engineer a program to check whether or not it infringes on a software patent. The Stac vs MS case is the exception to this rule.
Licensing is often the only really viable option to small companies.
The ONLY argument against software patents that I consider serious is the economic argument that individual inventors or writers of free software don't have the funds to patent their works
That's indeed the main argument, and given that patent law is a purely economical law, I don't see how it can be discarded.
Basically, that patents and patent litigation are too expensive to allow free software to properly flourish. If this is true, it's a problem, but I see many arguments against it,
and disallowing software patents is not a solution to me
Why not?
It may not be the best way, but then again, he didn't think of it first, did he??
So? There is no inherent exclusive moral right to something you thought of first. That's the big difference between patents and copyright. The latter also recognises a natural moral right of a creator to his creation, the former doesn't. It's pure economics. Have a look at this presentation by a law scholar who wrote a study on software patents for the JURI Committee of the European Parliament.
You see, patents are about making money from an invention. Most coders simply don't care about money, so they get shafted day after day, year after year.
And spending several man years on developing a program, trying to sell it and then being prohibited from doing that because apparently you infringe some software patent is not getting shafted?
One man's protection is another man's limitation. You're shortsighted if you only look at the chances that you might win the patent lottery, and consider the downsides of the resulting monopolies as irrelevant and per definition less harmful than the positive effects of the patent system in a particular sector.
It's the same as any other speculative endeavor. Real estate, business, it's all the same.
The software patent system indeed has become some kind of gambling market. Some businesses have even optimised their business model to it, such as EOLAS
Patents have never before been applied to works that are immediate realisations of pencil and paper work
The European Patent Office wants to change that. From page 16 of this recent decision of the Board of Appeal of the EPO):
The Board is aware that its comparatively broad interpretation of
the term "invention" in Article 52(1) EPC will include activities which
are so familiar that their technical character tends to be overlooked,
such as the act of writing using pen and paper.
Anyone wants to bet how long it'll still take until they start granting patents for pen and paper-implemented inventions?
are what happens when our legislators make laws about things they know nothing about
Actually, in the US they are what happened because the legislators did not make any laws about them. Their introduction happened entirely through case law, i.e. court decisions.
a for loop or some such stupid thing, ends up getting patented which sums up ranges of numbers.
Pretty much all software patents are about summing up ranges of numbers. After all, all a computer can do is mathematics, and you can present any mathematical function as a transformation of one bunch of numbers to another bunch of numbers.
Some guy even proved using lambda calculus that because of this property, several assumptions about the patent system are in contradiction with each other when applied to computer programs.
To them, either you are one of them or you are hamburger just waiting to be blown up so that they can get their way, get publicity, prove that "Allah is great" by detonating a bomb in a crowd,
To be honest, I doubt the terrorism has fundamentally (i.e., at the base) little if anything to do with religion. It's all about power balance (or absence of it) and socio-economic situations imho.
Religion is just a (quite powerful) means to mobilise people for whatever your goal is. The nice thing about religion is also that you can justify about anything using it, as everything depends on some interpretation of vague texts. They can always be explained in a way that suits your goals.
or even worse, fracture and polarize your society into militants who believe in retaliation and the peacenicks who think that if you are nice they will leave you alone.
Just like you can't categorise the entire world in good and evil, you also can't divide an entire society in mindless retaliating militants and unworldly philosophising hippies. Generally most people will be somewhere in the middle, and in different ways (e.g. with or without an opinion on what a "balanced" approach should be, and what kind of approach that would be).
Once they get some sympathy from the weak members of society they actually start to gain political power in your country.
I agree that terrorist organisations generally thrive on weak members of society. Weak in the sense of e.g. having little or nothing left they consider worth living for (lost family members, no outlook in society,...), or feeling that their way of living is threatened (can't feel safe anymore in your own neighbourhood,...). Extremists always take advantage of those people, as they are the easiest to influence, and will generally try to further such conditions instead of trying to fundamentally solve them.
Yes, I do consider Bush and his in-crowd to be extremists as well. No, I do not equate them with a terrorist organisation, but from time to time they use quite similar basic principles (paint the world as being black and white with yourself as the good guy and everyone who disagrees with you as the bad guy, fear mongering to garner more support, try to control people,...).
You only have to read the first claim (which I posted here).
The claim indeed says "existence means for determining whether a particular data item is present in the system" (by checking the hashes aka identifiers for the data). So it's more like the principle of hash tables (and all variants, such as considering each computer on a p2p network as a hashtable in which you check for an item, or maybe even considering the whole p2p network as one giant hash table) and indeed not just hashes that they patented.
I think the patent is this one. At least, it's mentioned here. It's really crazy, it truly is a patent on the principle of hashing (when done in "a data processing system").
Here is the first claim of the patent:
1. In a data processing system, an apparatus comprising:
identity means for determining, for any of a plurality of data items present in the system, a substantially unique identifier, the identifier being determined using and depending on all of the data in the data item and only the data in the data item, whereby two identical data items in the system will have the same identifier; and
existence means for determining whether a particular data item is present in the system, by examining the identifiers of the plurality of data items.
Slashdot Mirror
We have exactly the same standard in Europe (for assessing the "inventive step". However, as Reinier Bakels (a law scholar who wrote a study on software patents for Committee of Juridical Affairs of the European Parliament) once wrote in a mail (translation from Dutch, the caps were also in the original post):
I believe that in the US, there is no separate novelty requirement, but the end result is the same. You simply cannot say it must be "very" non-obvious, or "how skilled" in the art the person must be. You have to have a consistently applicable rule, otherwise you're going to get appeals and maybe even lawsuits to no end from applicants who feel their "person skilled in the art" was too skilled compared to the one that assessed someone else's patent.
But appart from anecdotical evidence, do you have any data to back this up? Even in the fifties, there were already doubts about this. You probably have heard this quote already, but if you haven't: in a study for the US Congress, Fritz Machlup said back then:
So he's saying the overall effect was considered to be bad, but that you can't just take everyone's patents suddenly away, so you have to keep it. That's different from extending it towards new fields (such as software) though.
At least here in Europe, we do not consider copyright to be a weapon of the megacorps, on the contrary.
The cost is certainly a very important aspect. Whether it's due to the legal system or something else is not very relevant: it's the reality in which we live and how the system works. Many proponents of software patents often say "if we would have an ideal examination procedure which would get rid of all bad software patents, then they would have a good effect".
That may be so (although even that is debatable), but t
I do agree with that.
You'd better don't read them, or you can be convicted for treble damages because of "wilful infringement".
There's also the very important concept of "patentable subject matter", i.e. whether or not it potentially could be patentable at all. Although in the US this concept has been widened to "everything made by man under the Sun", this still excludes some things (like e.g. laws of nature). In Europe, there are more exclusions (see below).
The problem with trivial patents is basically inherent to the patent system. "Non-obvious" does not mean the same in patent law as it does in real life. It's basically an extended novelty test: novelty checks whether or not what you claim to be your invention has already been published somewhere or not, non-obviousness tests whether it isn't a literal (and then I mean really "literal") combination of published things.
The reason is that it is impossible to set an objective standard which can be consistently applied to determine the "inventiveness height" or so. For the patent office, it is however very important to have such a standard. Patent officials know this, see e.g. this discussion between a deputy director of the UKPTO and a programmer. There is nothing you can do about this without overhauling the entire way patent law works, and people are very reluctant to do this. You cannot "fix" it by improving examination.
Now, traditionally, it has been assumed that despite its flaws, the patent system had an overall positive effect. If you patent a trivial improvement to a hammer (e.g. a hook at the bottom to you can hang it onto a wall), this patent could have little value (because people may be able to work around it easily, or because no-one would be interested in your improvement).
Since software is pure mathematics (all a computer can do is compute), patenting improvements in software itself is patenting math improvements (when this math is interpreted by a computer). Pretty much all math improvements are trivial by design. The whole mathematical system is built that way. And patenting one improvement blocks a whole lot of other people. Someone even made a theoretical proof using lambda calculus showing that because of this, several assumption made about the patent system simply are not true for software.
In Europe, currently there are 4 requirements for patentability: you have to have an invention (patentable subject matter) and this invention must be new, non-obvious and industrially applicable. One by one:
Now, in article 52(3) of the EPC (on the same page), they say that the exclusion of those things being inventions only applies to those things "as such". This originally meant that if
Note that the fact that you do something in software and you patent that, does not make the result a software patent. I mean, controlling a weaving machine is obviously always done using computers nowadays. If you find a new positioning of the blades so they can cut threads more easily, and all you have to do for that is change the value of one variable in the program, then a patent on this is not a software patent.
After all, your achievement is finding how the blade has to be positioned, not the software itself. In case of a DSP algorithm, the achievement is the mathematics, which are not patentable. The only thing that automagically makes it patentable, is the fact that it's implemented in software (because a computer suddenly makes everything technical).
- TRIPS requires us to have software patents
- Innovation needs software patents
- Software patents are good for SMEs
- Only a small group, which consists of piracy extremists, opposes software patents
The balanced point of this report, which really is nothing but an objective observation based on available data, is a refreshing change.When I called the Council secretariat a few weeks ago to ask some questions about the procedure, the person responsible for this dossier told me they were just busy doing some final juridical-linguistic checking and then it was good to be approved. It would surprise me if this final formal checking would suddenly take two more months.
It was most likely enforceable in the UK, as there the courts generally do uphold software patents. The highest court in Germany traditionally nullified most software patents in court cases however, though the last few years some exceptions have occurred. I don't know the case law of Italy and France regarding software patents.
I do know that for example in the Netherlands, no one has ever even tried to enforce a software patent in a court however. So claiming that a directive which clearly makes software patents always enforceable simply "harmonises the status quo", is definitely not true. If something is codified, it's at a best a snapshot of the case law of a few courts from yesterday.
- you don't sell any software yourself (so you can sue people, but they can't countersue you)
- or if you have a large enough patent portfolio to force everyone (except those from point 1) into cross-licensing agreements
If you are a regular small company which writes and sells software, you don't belong to either category and you're screwed. Coincidentally, such companies provide for 80% of employment in the IT sector in Germany and 60% in Belgium. It's probably similar in the rest of Europe.There's however something special about this one. The magic word "PriceWaterhousCoopers" (try saying it quickly 10 times!) opens a lot of ears which remain deaf in other cases.
No.
WireTap works fine as well, and is free.
That doesn't mean it stifles innovation, in the sense that it doesn't prevent other people from innovating. Besides, the fact that something is open source does not automatically mean that it's usable in other programs as well (e.g., it may be written badly or completely intermingled in the host application).
That's very informative, thank you.
You think wrong. Copying (source or object code) is covered by copyright. Patents apply even if you developed something entirely on your own in a remote cave on a desolate island. No distinction is made between software and other things in US patent law. Reverse engineering has nothing to do with patents either, that's covered by copyright as well (and at least in Europe is explicitly allowed for interoperability purposes, I don't know about the US).
The agreement is not about copyright as far as I can see. That's also quite logical, otherwise Sun would be allowed to pirate all the Microsoft software it wanted. Patents and copyright are two completely different and unrelated things. The point of the covenant is exactly to allow the companies to use each other's patent portfolio's, so whether it would be done blatantly or not is irrelevant as well.
The fact is simply that for some reason, Open Office was not included in the covenant (either because Microsoft insisted on this for some reason, because Sun didn't care enough for some reason or a combination of the two).
No, and I'm quite sure RMS is aware of that as well. The reason it's not how reality works, is that it's completely unfeasible to do so. Large companies count on their defensive patent portfolio to be able to get a cross licensing deal should they get notified of infringing someone else's patent, and small companies count on not being noticed. After all, if you check whether you infringe patents, you may even be convicted to pay treble damages in court because of willful infringement.
The fact that this kind of ostrich strategy is the only feasible one, is one of the signs that the system is not working.
An average court case to invalidate an invalid patent costs US$ 1,500,000 to US$ 2,000,000. Many small companies can't "decide" to go that way. Avoiding is also often quite difficult, since many software patents are basically patents on the simple fact that you do something (selling via the internet, distributing video data over a network, ...), with very little if any details on how. In general, you don't have to reverse-engineer a program to check whether or not it infringes on a software patent. The Stac vs MS case is the exception to this rule.
Licensing is often the only really viable option to small companies.
That's indeed the main argument, and given that patent law is a purely economical law, I don't see how it can be discarded.
Then I would suggest you to check this out.
Why not?
So? There is no inherent exclusive moral right to something you thought of first. That's the big difference between patents and copyright. The latter also recognises a natural moral right of a creator to his creation, the former doesn't. It's pure economics. Have a look at this presentation by a law scholar who wrote a study on software patents for the JURI Committee of the European Parliament.
And spending several man years on developing a program, trying to sell it and then being prohibited from doing that because apparently you infringe some software patent is not getting shafted?
One man's protection is another man's limitation. You're shortsighted if you only look at the chances that you might win the patent lottery, and consider the downsides of the resulting monopolies as irrelevant and per definition less harmful than the positive effects of the patent system in a particular sector.
The software patent system indeed has become some kind of gambling market. Some businesses have even optimised their business model to it, such as EOLAS
Some guy even proved using lambda calculus that because of this property, several assumptions about the patent system are in contradiction with each other when applied to computer programs.
Religion is just a (quite powerful) means to mobilise people for whatever your goal is. The nice thing about religion is also that you can justify about anything using it, as everything depends on some interpretation of vague texts. They can always be explained in a way that suits your goals.
Just like you can't categorise the entire world in good and evil, you also can't divide an entire society in mindless retaliating militants and unworldly philosophising hippies. Generally most people will be somewhere in the middle, and in different ways (e.g. with or without an opinion on what a "balanced" approach should be, and what kind of approach that would be). I agree that terrorist organisations generally thrive on weak members of society. Weak in the sense of e.g. having little or nothing left they consider worth living for (lost family members, no outlook in society,Yes, I do consider Bush and his in-crowd to be extremists as well. No, I do not equate them with a terrorist organisation, but from time to time they use quite similar basic principles (paint the world as being black and white with yourself as the good guy and everyone who disagrees with you as the bad guy, fear mongering to garner more support, try to control people, ...).
The claim indeed says "existence means for determining whether a particular data item is present in the system" (by checking the hashes aka identifiers for the data). So it's more like the principle of hash tables (and all variants, such as considering each computer on a p2p network as a hashtable in which you check for an item, or maybe even considering the whole p2p network as one giant hash table) and indeed not just hashes that they patented.
You don't make patents specific to anything, but as broad as possible. They simply patented "calculating a hash of some data".
Here is the first claim of the patent: