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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.

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Try reading my post above as it addresses this | 1347 comments | Create New Account

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

Try reading my post above as it addresses this

Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 14 2012 @ 10:36 AM EDT

There is no guaranteed way to tell the difference between a disc covered by
patents and one that simply has an error - as the patented software 'may' appear
as the error.

The example used earlier about a piece of music that has been stored on a cd is
the perfect demonstration. The 1's and 0's could be the control software for a
patented process or could be a copy of 'blowin in the wind'.

Computer circuitry doesn't care, it's just designed to take 1's and 0's and
process them with one of the fundamental computer operators (think there are
effectively 8 as demonstrated in the PDP-8, load, store, jump, conditional jump,
add, negate, nop).

Patenting software makes as much sense as patenting whether the wind is blowing
(if blowing = 1, if not blowing then 0). With the right weather conditions, you
could get a Mahler symphony or a Justin Bieber. You could, of course interpret
the stream as patented software for controlling fudge production if you so
wanted.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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