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NO! We need a legal definition of software | 354 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
NO! We need a legal definition of software
Authored by: feldegast on Monday, November 26 2012 @ 09:07 AM EST
Software is a number of different mathematical languages
that are represented by symbols

These languages are read by a computer in the same way as a
human reads a book, in order for the computer to understand
the instructions they are translated by other programs into
simpler instructions if required

The computer as it reads these simple instructions performs
one or more limited actions that are fixed and unchangeable
as they are hard coded into the processor at time of
manufacture (the CPU instruction set), this is similar to a
human reading a book and generating imaginary scenes in
their brain except the instructions in a cpu are more
limited.

So a simple way to exclude patents on software would be to
say "patents are excluded on anything that is processed by a
CPU.



---
IANAL
My posts are ©2004-2012 and released under the Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • s/CPU/ALU/ - Authored by: Wol on Monday, November 26 2012 @ 03:45 PM EST
NO! We need a legal definition of software
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 26 2012 @ 01:40 PM EST
> As Tkilgore's excellent report observed there are fine upstanding
citizens in positions of power and influence who are begging
for an explanation of the boundary between hardware and software.

What exactly does the very interesting phrase "begging for an
explanation" mean? We could spend all of next week parsing that for finer
and finer distinctions, could we not?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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