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| Authored by: stegu on Wednesday, October 10 2012 @ 11:22 AM EDT |
The city museum where I live (Norrkoping, Sweden) has
a Jacquard loom on display, and maintains it in working
order (with some heroic effort from two enthusiasts).
It is operated for a few hours on most weekends to
the delight of the general public, and in the museum
shop you can buy some ridiculously expensive but
immensely cool patterned cloth woven in that very loom.
The loom was patented. The card punch which was used
to program it was patented. Tangible machines made
of steel and brass. Even the punch cards were patented,
because it took quite some effort to find the right
material and figure out how to stitch the cards
together in a flexible but robust manner.
But nobody in their right mind would have come up
with the idea of patenting the pattern that is woven
by the configuration of holes in a particular set of
punch cards loaded into the loom. If somebody would
have tried to patent "a floral pattern, comprising
a rendition of roses in a periodic geometric
arrangement" they would have been laughed out of
the patent office before their application was filed.
This is the realm of copyright, not patents, and
for copyright the claim would have needed to be a lot
more specific and include a detailed depiction of
the particular design that was to be protected.
And yet it is exactly that kind of protection
of vague and abstract design ideas that applicants
are seeking through software patents and utility
patents nowadays.
What went wrong? When did the world go crazy?
It is a pity that the complexity and the opaque nature
of digital computers make people blind to the fact
that software is just information, and that the machine
running the software is distinct from the software itself.
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