🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9008061955.AA14545@stc06.CTD.ORNL.GOV>,
de5@STC06.CTD.ORNL.GOV (SILL D E) writes:
|> >2) You don't own a graphic user interface.
|> 
|> That's a horse of another color.  Nobody's talking about patenting
|> interfaces.

You must have started reading this list very recently, Dave.  Patenting
of interfaces is a very big issue here.  Just the same, I'm glad you
agree with me here.

> >Software is adequately protected by traditional copyright (of the
code itself)
> >and trade secret rules.

> True enough, if you're not bothered by the fact that without decent,
> workable software patents many algorithms are hidden away in
> proprietary code and protected by non-disclosure agreements.

Algorithms have a tendency to be rediscovered independently when the time
is right for them.  My field is digital signal processing.  Imagine what
a horrible world we'd live in if AT&T held a monopoly on the use of the
Fast Fourier Transform.  For some reason, the authors published the paper
anyway, despite the vast commercial and industrial use of this algorithm.
Had Cooley and Tukey not published, the algorithm would have been
independently rediscovered soon later; it exists in the properties of
the transform itself, it was not a creation of Cooley and Tukey.

If you discover an algorithm and hide it, others in your field will
discover it a year later.  That's because algorithms, for the most part,
are discovered rather than invented.  This distinction was established
in law by the founders of the country (you can't patent mathematical
relationships or laws of nature) and algorithms more closely resemble
these than they do, say, the invention of the phonograph.  It was on this
basis that patenting algorithms was long held illegal.


--
Joe Buck
jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck