Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> its the fact that you are giving instructions on what *to do*, which 
>> makes the **instructions** non-patentable.
> 
> People don't patent the instructions.
> 
>> Software is, on a basic level, **instructions**, not the "thing" itself. 
> 
> That's why people don't patent the instructions. If you're not even 
> going to read the claims of a patent, there's not a lot of sense in 
> discussing it with you.
> 
Well, then don't. I consider the wording, no matter what it says, to be 
little more than slight of hand. A, "Well, the instructions are 
copyrighted, but the combination of the instructions and the machine, 
which produce X result are patented." No, the result is, as you say, but 
even that is imho, questionable, since in most cases, the result is 
transitory, and of a nature that makes it basically either data to be 
moved/transmitted/stored and used some place else, of some equivalent to 
a printed page. Last I checked, you can't patent books either, yet, 
under your definition, they are the result, just like the cabinet. The 
problem is, simply, if your "result", or even the process to get that 
result, amount to data->instructions->resulting in more data, well.. 
This differs how from say, computing the area of a circle, using the 
"data" out of the prior step, in which you determined the circumference? 
Its just a step in the process. There is no "cabinet" at the end of it, 
which constitutes a tangible asset.

Might there be some set of such patents that "may" be, if not iffy, then 
beneficial, so allowed? Maybe. A lot of people have argued that such a 
claim is itself suspect, based on their experience and the rising costs 
of having to cover 50,000 different "patents" that might be needed, just 
to show a pink, pokadot, 3D cube, using X companies hardware, with Y 
companies software, with Z persons library, in Q country, if standing in 
your head, while wearing a dress... In short, if it costs you 500 times 
what it takes to make something to cover all the damn patents, people 
are hardly going to be inclined to invent it... In the computer world, 
some things get *close* to that bad, and everyone knows it.

-- 
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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