Kevin Wampler wrote:
> I've heard that the reason for this is because, since software patents 
> are sort of broken, 

Not broken, invalid as a concept. Please describe to me *anything* in 
software that isn't technically a set of instructions, which, in 
principle, a human could not reproduce themselves, if they had some 
means to access the same data, and some means to produce the same 
results on a computer screen. Can't? Well, then, software patents are 
not legal at all, since you can't patent such "instruction sets", as 
defined by the laws set up to define what you *can* patent. The problem 
is, no one mentions this niggling little detail, or makes sure the 
people in the court, like the judge, knows that software "is" such a 
thing. One side argues its not, but never manages to say why, the other 
side argues it is, and babbles about unique, protecting IP, etc., and 
the courts go by what they know, which is, "Someone wrote the thing, and 
its all incomprehensible to me, so sounds like a machine, not instructions."

If that where true though, I, and others, would have been breaching 
patent every time they tweaked the read code on the Apple IIs to produce 
copy protection, or crack it, or just to look at the raw data, follow 
the decoding instructions, to manually work out the result, to see why a 
sector on the disk was bad and not reading correctly. Oops.. Turns out a 
human "can" follow machine instructions, not just the machine.

No, we have this problem because, it seems, everyone arguing the cases 
has either ignored, glossed over, or blindingly failed to address, the 
"definition" of patent, and why it can't apply, and instead dealt solely 
with ownership, uniqueness, and whines about "stifling innovation", 
which it turns out is statistically worse when they are imposed in this 
case.

-- 
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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