🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <HANS.91Sep3143556@bilbo.es.ele.tue.nl> hans@es.ele.tue.nl (Hans Fleurkens) writes:

   => This question is perhaps answerable for less than one million dollars in
   => legal fees, but I doubt it.

   => A layman's reading of the law would seem to say that algorithm patents
   => are not permitted.  But the Patent and Trademark Office disagrees.  So
   => do many patent lawyers.

   Probably because they can earn a lot of money with it. Finally, the
   possibility to get a patent for an algorithm or piece of code will
   kill the software industry (except for a few big companies) and they have
   no job anymore :-).

   Hans Fleurkens
   Eindhoven University of Technology.


Distribution of source code should still be permitted, right, since that
is equivalent to the description of an algorithm rather than its
implementation? A text file is after all not executable by a computer
(under normal circumstances), and distributing source code amounts
to publication and (though wordy comments) discusion of the patented
material, which is what patents are supposed to encourage, right? 

--

---
Dietrich Kappe
kap1@icarus.spc.uchicago.edu