Groklaw - Digging for Truth

	When you want to know more...

Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines

ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

You won't find me on Facebook

Donate

No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.

What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments

Sponsors

Hosting:

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster

No, software is *INSTRUCTIONS*, in machine-usable form | 1347 comments | Create New Account

Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.

No, software is *INSTRUCTIONS*, in machine-usable form

Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, June 13 2012 @ 02:04 PM EDT

And if I were Charles Goodyear, with my anachronistic, computerised Mix-o-matic,
having found that adding sulfur to the rubber vulcanised it (and ignoring the
priority issues), the patent for the process would still be for the addition of
rubber, not the fairly obvious process of writing the instructions for the
Mix-o-matic, whether this was done as a relay panel, Charles Babbage style
gears, or a modern microprocessor in your favorite language (Relay Ladder for
some!)

Given a good specification, the actual programming is usually obvious, if
tedious. The really big projects fail on the specification end first.

MD5, of recent virus attacks, is an excellent example. Given the specification,
which you can read as an internet RFC, any competent programmer can implement
it. Coming up with the specification, and proving its properties, is much more
difficult.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

In other words - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, June 13 2012 @ 04:48 PM EDT

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )