Re: [PLUG] Places to learn Linux and C around Philadelphia?

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Mon, Oct 9, 2023 at 6:04 PM Lynn Bradshaw <readyready15728@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Algorithms are just theorems and therefore can't be patented"; it's actually been mentioned in legal cases before:
>

I didn't say that algorithms couldn't be patented.  I said that they
couldn't be copyrighted.

Going to the articles you linked: As far as differentiation between
ideas that are invented vs discovered, I think that is a rather
dubious distinction.  It seems equivalent to trying to hold to both
Platonic realism and nominalism at the same time.  Literally
everything that exists can be reduced to combinations of fundamental
laws of nature.  You can argue that the laws of physics always existed
and we're just figuring out what they are.  Or you can argue that the
expression of the law was an act that required creativity.  Trying to
say that addition and integration are discovered and the FFT was
invented will inevitably lead to having to try to draw some kind of
arbitrary line based on complexity.

I think that it makes far more sense to just say that most practical
math can't be patented simply due to it already having prior art.
Certainly a ton of patents exist around things like 5G modulations and
such, and that's just math.  Video codecs are routinely patented, and
they're just math as well.

All that said, judges generally aren't great scientific philosophers
(most scientific philosophers probably aren't great ones either), so
it doesn't surprise me at all that they try to make distinctions like
these.  We've seen courts decide that APIs can be copyrighted, for
example.

Programmers make arguments that I think are equally dubious, like the
idea that dynamically linking to a library creates a derivative work
of that library (the whole GPL vs LGPL distinction).  Dynamic linking
is nothing more than the insertion of cross-references, so this seems
equivalent to arguing that embedding a hyperlink in a document makes
it subject to the copyright of whatever it is linked to.  Or if I
reference page 5 of some book I might need to pay royalties to the
author for simply making mention of it.

In the end I think courts end up being guided more by the consequences
of their rulings, trying to come up with rationales that seem to lead
to the most desirable result.  If an interpretation leads to people
who commercialize an idea having to share some of their profits, and
people who maintain libraries not having to pay huge fees, then
arguments get stretched however they need to be in order to make that
the final policy.  Consistency of interpretation across different
scenarios isn't as important as consistency within a single scenario.

-- 
Rich
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