On Friday 28 December 2001 13:53, John S. Gage wrote: (In decidedly scholarly and measured fashion )
> Patent protection in the United States arises from the Constitution: "To > promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited > times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective > writings and discoveries;" [Article 1, Section 8] IANA(C)L but that seems to me to bracket together copyright and letters patent, as well as leaving the question of what a suitable limit on time is. We in this country also have a constitution, we just havn't got round to writing it down yet, and also a history of granting rights to particular people to exploit and provide some particular service - in theory and previously practice by a grant from the Sovereign usually to one of her kin. When these rules were made the speed of disemination of invention, and of implementation of invention, were slow by comparison with now. If internet years are 5/1 then a 15 year patent on a one way clicking doohickey on a spinning jenny would translate quite nicely to a 36 month run on a way of sorting lists. However, I feel that one writes a computer program, and it is in a real sense and in one that various courts have considered, an act of expression. Thus the specific implementation of a specific algorithm seems to me to be better covred by copyright than by a patent. I can imagine a specific algorithm which does something heretofore thought to be impossible being patented, something that rapidly and easily factors very large prime numbers for instance, but the actual program which broke PGP by factoring the primes would be copyrightable, not covered under a patent for "a method of breaking codes by complicated long division sums" whch seems to be the degree of precision that is applied at present and which fails the expressed purpose given above for having copyright and patents. The other reason for them of course is that if you tried to patent such a recipe or copyright an instantiation of it then either NSA or GCHQ would get a message from the Patent Office, and some very polite gentlemen would come to remark on how very clever you were and how keen the Sov would be to have first go at your new toy for a few years. -- From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/
