Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> Some of this stuff just gets bloody stupid.
> 
> There's a lot of stupidity in the patent process, but it isn't anything 
> I've ever seen talked about *here*.  People just don't understand the 
> patent process, and think that legal terms like "obvious" have some 
> relationship to what they mean in English, or that you can look at a 
> patent filing and tell exactly what's covered by it without looking at 
> the prosecution of the patent.
> 
Hmm. Problem here is that obvious isn't a "precise" term either. Anyone 
trying to the solve the same problem *and* with the expertise to do it, 
has a high chance of seeing the same "obvious* solution, unless they are 
just so caught up in existing failed ones that they don't think of it. 
For someone with no expertise, who doesn't have the problem... it might 
as well be Chinese, translated from Greek, and originally written in 
Klingon. The relevant experts need to be questioned, not some guy behind 
a desk with a search engine, which isn't *designed* to make such 
assessments, just look for keywords.

Read something on Groklaw a few days ago, with respect to precisely this 
sort of "software patent" issue. The point made in the article is that, 
in principle, everything a computer does is "math", or something 
equivalent, software is merely a description of the process to get a 
result, and that **in theory** any human being, with enough time, 
pencils and paper, could "follow" those instructions, to produce the 
same result. Such "lists of instructions" are ***not*** patentable under 
law. Yet, because a computer follows them real damn fast, companies are 
allowed to both copyright the instruction **and** patent them. I sort of 
had the sense that it didn't make any damn sense for a while, but I 
never had someone adequately describe *why* I found the idea absurd before.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091111151305785

Though, I have to admit, reading that was a lot more boring than reading 
why it is that SCO is screwed, even if they *do* somehow manage to 
convince someone to believe that they owned Linux:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091116121914292

That one gave me a good laugh. Though, the amount of time and money 
wasted on this BS with them... Sigh...

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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