Software is The Glass Bead Game [LWN.net]

Software is The Glass Bead Game

Posted Feb 1, 2012 13:43 UTC (Wed) by java_developer (guest, #82469)
In reply to: Software is The Glass Bead Game by giraffedata
Parent article: LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

GiraffeData said:

But what is internal and what is end result is a matter of perspective too.

What you're saying is true. It's a problem with examiners, judges and the courts that they are not equal to seeing through the distorting perspective presented to them by patent attorneys and their clients who seek to impose a distorted notion of what should be patentable subject matter for the purpose of restricting competition in the second case and siphoning off vast sums of capital for non-value producing activities in the first case.

GiraffeData said:

Maybe what general purpose computers did was just make it really easy to invent really big things and messed up the balance.

It's not a bad way of expressing it. Actually, what computers did was advance society in astronomical ways.

Later, much later, what IP lawyers did was conceive of a scheme to inject themselves, like a virus, into that value stream and create a diseased condition whose symptoms are, the creation of value is slowed to the point of extinction relative to what it had been prior; the IP attoneys extract obscene amounts of money from the creators of that value; insurmountable barriers to entry upon would-be creators of value is introduced; huge amounts of time and energy are spent warring over patents which have a net negative value to everyone but IP attorneys; would-be creators of value are discouraged from the field.

There is no reason that equally abstract things are not patented except the current regime of IP everything didn't arrive on the scene prior to their existence.

The examples are endless and everywhere.

For instance, novel plot twists clearly should be patentable - they fit the criteria: useful? - the novelist generates economic activity just because she's clever; non obvious? - by definition; advance the art? - other novelists can use variants on the new plot twist, after paying the original novelist.

Surely such a scheme must increase economic activity and increase a nation's wealth if IP Maximalist's arguments are to be believed.

So why are novel plot twists not patentable?

Ahem...

Patent #0239489023234: A Plot Twist Involving Gender Deception

An entity, in one realization a man who is in love with another entity , in one realization a woman, whereby the first entity deceives the second entity through the device of disguising their gender, using for instance a wig and makeup, for the purpose of obtaining a more intimate proximity to the second entity.

Blah blah blah,

fuckin' blah blah blah,

fuckin' blah,

fuckin' blah blah blah....

Application Number 28734897239723 Filing Date: MAR 2010 Patent Number 98247892374923784 Issue Date 6222646 Feb 1 2012

The ONLY reason society is not now jammed to the gills and floating lifeless on top of a dead stream of innovation is because there was no computer on which to realize novels and no IP attorneys looking over that computer thinking... "hmmm....it's a machine, isn't it?"

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