European rejection of software patents is a victory for open source

European rejection of software patents is a victory for open source

In your specific example, no patent system in the world (currently), even the USPTO, would protect it (if they abided by their own rules, a most unlikely prospect) - it would be a clear consequence of a mathematical fact (some pattern to the distribution of primes), and therefore unpatentable as it would be a discovery not an invention. So the algorithm(s) would be obvious once the mathematical fact is known. I wouldn't expect an actual real live patent examiner to reject it, but by the rules it certainly should be.

My jab was really at patent examiners : I can think of no possible patent system for which it is economic to employ examiners to do a proper job.

My point on the reverse engineering argument is : why should every invention be afforded the same length of government enforced monopoly? This is clearly discriminatory against inventions which are harder to reverse engineer. The people who derive the most benefit from the patent system are those who hold a trivial patent legally thought to be valid, because they gain the most additional value that they would not have in a free market.

So yes, I agree - people with easy to reverse engineer, trivial patents are the most protected. But I don't agree that is a good thing economically in any field, software or not.