Tim Cook wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> 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."
> 
> Isn't *everything* reducible to a "set of instructions"?
> 
> -- 
> Tim Cook
> http://empyrean.freesitespace.net
Uh.. Please describe to me the "instructions" for *being* a shovel. 
Making one, sure, but that isn't a "patent", only the final product is. 
The act of using the shovel could be, but again, you can't use something 
without having it first. In any case, I am not stating some vague 
opinion on the matter. The actual, specific, legal definitions of 
patents exclude "sets of instructions that a person can follow for get a 
specific result". You can't patent mathematical formula, for example, 
and the reason you can't is because they fall under that specific rule. 
You can't patent the *process* used to build something, you can 
trademark it, copyright it, if in written form, but only the *product* 
of those steps is patentable, *not* the process used to get to it. 
Software is, at a basic level, all math, and on a more general level, 
its like the instruction manual used to tell you how to "build" a 
cabinet, not the cabinet itself. The former is not patentable, the later is.

-- 
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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