Well, one simply shift the the burden to start (big fines in case of a bogus patent).
A good place to start, but I'd have to question the simplicity of the measure. For instance, the genuine inventor stands to be wiped out by fines that a multinational would pay out of petty cash. Politically, this would be very hard to implement.
Buffering of introducing delays (artificial or natural); we'll take the time we need to study the application no matter the workload we have, that should avoid a DoS like attack
I was thinking of DDOS attacks as well. The trouble here is that you can't just drop all the pending patent applications and start with empty pipes. Taking the time to do everything by the book would stall the entire process completely.
Now if you could limit the rate at which a submitter could apply, that might help... assuming you can stop patents being filed by employees in their own name and simultaneously signed over to the company, for instance. It's also a bit rough on the genuine researcher who makes a single breakthrough that yields five genuinely patentable inventions.
when a system like this one is in equilibrium there would be less and less bogus applications (IMHO).
Which doesn't mean the equilibrium point is necessarily reachable, of course. And if it is, there's no guarantee that the equilibrium level would be one that serves the purposes for which patents were designed. I can image a system where Microsoft, HP, IBM and a dozen other tech giants published perhaps a dozen high quality patents every year, but where no-one outside the group could afford to make a patent application, and no one could afford to licence any of these patents except as part of a cross licensing deal.
And yes, the music companies want to retain control and maximize profits. But realize that whatever move they make next, it won't be specifically to push DRM, but whatever pushes their income.
Which raises the question: So What?
Really, I don't care if they're going to attempt to resurrect Mother Theresa and invent a machine that will give Free Beer to Everyone, For Ever And Ever! If they try and do it by means of DRM, it's still a bad idea.
It comes right down to the process is overloaded. We don't put enough people and energy into maintaining the patent system and it is geared solely toward protecting large industry and business.
The question then is whether it is possible to put enough people and energy into maintaining the patent system.
Certainly it is to the advantage of those building IP thickets that the system should be overloaded. The less time the examiner has, the greater the chance of a spurious patent getting rubber stamped. So allocating resources to the patent office isn't necessarily going to help, since the system's abusers will likely increase the volume of submissions.
Worse, there's an asymmetry to the workload involved. Examining a patent should be a process of careful and painstaking research. That's not necessarily a problem when the patents being examined are the result of a similar painstaking effort. The trouble is that if the submitter doesn't care about novelty, then they can skip most of the research.
This means that a bogus patent can be drafted and submitted with far less effort than that required to properly examine and reject same.
I don't think the system can be fixed by throwing money at it. I rather doubt it can be fixed at all.
So let me see if I have this straight: If I don't an iSlate I will be cast out from the society of people who spend all their time reading Twilight books in coffee shops?
Too bad for you that tying in and of itself is not illegal nor anti-competitive
It's not illegal. You could make a case for it being anti-competitive, in the sense of "unfairly restricting competition" as opposed to "in violation of anti-competitiveness laws". I'm not sure I'd agree with such a position, but I don't think you can rule it out quite so blithely.
... nor that you are in a position to deem it so like you say.
Actually, the GP can deem it howsoever he pleases. As can you and I. We probably aren't all in a position to
take that deeming and have it enforced as a judge might in a court of law. But we're still entitled to make the
judgement.
And after all, that's how laws get changed. If enough people deem a law unfair or incomplete,
they lobby their representative. If enough people lobby, the law gets changed. We can deem whatever we please.
Redhat isn't running Gnome#, they are running Gnome
Well, Gnome# isn't a desktop environment, in the same sense as Gnome. It's just a set of
C# bindings for the Gnome libraries. So no-one is running Gnome#; just Gnome with one or more components written in C#.
You are assuming that they would follow Gnome if it's switches to Gnome#.
No, I'm saying that using Mono components in the Gnome desktop is a bloody stupid idea for anyone that isn't owned by Novell.
If Red Hat don't use Mono on their Desktop (and currently it seems they don't) then there isn't a problem.
But as I mentioned in my last post, the point here is not "Red Hat sucks" and its not "Red Hat is Doomed". My point is
"Using Mono for key infrastructure elements is a terrible strategy". I stand by that.
If GNOME is the violating component, and GNOME is removed, then Red Hat is no longer liable
I agree. I'm not sure about the status of their support contracts which depend on the contested components, but in principle, I agree.
Red Hat will be fine.
That doesn't follow. Think it through a bit further.
On the day Red Hat are forced to remove all Mono based components, they are faced with a dilemma. The need a desktop evironment:
do they revert to the last clean Gnome release? Or do they adopt a different desktop environment (probably KDE) as standard?
Probably they'll do both. KDE will be fine for new custom, but RH are going to lose customers if that's the only DE on offer. Not because Gnome is better, but just because most of their corporate customers will not want to re-train staff to use the new environment. They'll look for one of the
distros signed up to the MS patent pact and who can still offer and support an up to date Gnome desktop.
So the chances are RH will look to fork Gnome from some clean version in the past. The trouble there is that if MS time their move carefully, that could mean going back five, even ten years. So let's suppose they have to go back five years. And let's further assume that with a year of hard work, plus community support, they can retro-fit enough features to make up for two of those years. So two years, plus a year dev time puts them three years behind Novell. Of course Novell have been developing Gnome further in that year (using only C# so RH can't benefit from their efforts) meaning there's an effective lag of four years between Red Hat and SUSIE on the Gnome desktop. And with Novell as MS' corporate partners in this, they've probably had the advertising literature ready to capitalise on this since five minutes before MS make the announcement. That's one hell of a competitive edge.
So however you look at it, Red Hat stand to take a big hit in terms of paying customers and support contracts.
Now maybe they can survive unscathed, although it won't be without considerable blood, toil, sweat and tears. Maybe they'll continue in business, but marginalised. And maybe they'll not be able to maintain enough revenue, and will go under.
This isn't about "Red Hat is good" or "Red Hat is bad". It's about "why take such a bloody stupid risk, with so much to lose and so little to gain?"
However you look at it, a Mono based Linux desktop is a strategically stupid move.
If a netbook comes out at $99 or less, its an impulse buy like a CD player or a ipod nano.
If it sells stores will carry it regardless of what microsoft wants.
Well exactly. But nevertheless, we've seen major retail chains that have somehow failed to stock the linux variations of some netbooks in favour of the windows ones; and we've seem OEMs that withdrew Linux based netbooks at the last moment before launch. Which suggests to me that MS have been active behind the scenes already.
There is a question as to how long they can keep it up, however.
They well could do. As I said below 2008 showed that if a laptop is cheap enough it will sell.
That's exactly right. If Microsoft's own history shows one thing, over and over, it is that "cheap and good enough" will win out over
"expensive, slick and over-engineered".
Of course, MS would be aware of this. So we'd expect them to try and leverage their market position to
make linux netbooks go away, either by persuading retail chains not to stock them, or OEMs to stop selling them.
Red Hat may very well be screwed, but most of the rest wouldn't be. Especially not Debian.
It stands to kill the commercial distros, though. Red Hat certainly. Ubuntu, to the extent that it wants to operate in the US market, which is going to be probably the most lucrative for some time to come. The choice would be to pay tribute to Redmond, or to die.
SUSIE stands to do well as the flagship Microsoft vassal, but I think Microsoft would count it a win if they could bring about Linux' commercial consolidation into one big player with no new companies able to emerge. MS know how to compete with corporations.
Debian, might survive, although I expect MS lawyers could find ways of bringing pressure to bear on developers, and against Debian as a legal entity. More likely though, they'd be happy simply to see Linux eradicated from the corporate world. What people use on their desktops at work, they tend to want running on the computer at home. If you can dominate corporate America, you can lead the world. At least, I imagine that's the thinking in Redmond anyway.
I never really fully understood this line of attack on C#/.NET/Mono.
I never really saw the sense in exposing ourselves to the risk of adopting a technology controlled by an organisation fundamentally opposed to all we stand for, and which offers few benefits, and nothing that can't be gained from other, unencumbered languages and frameworks. It's never seemed like sound strategy to me, except from Microsoft's viewpoint.
embrace it as a life lesson and show how you used the fallout from that event to learn to better take responsibility for your actions
That's the way to go, I'd have said. Mention it in your CV so everything's clear from the start. Some employers will be put off, but some are going to see it as evidence of talent. You can expect to get some searching questions about it at interviews... but it's better than hiding it, and having it come up on Google anyway.
The "publish a huge volume of information" approach could help as well, although depending how widely the file in question gets mirrored, you may never be able to hide it among the good stuff. Still, it can't hurt your job prospects to have a large positive online presence.
You don't need an embarrassing social disease to have a legitimate desire for privacy. Walk down any residential street: how many of the houses
have curtains in the windows?
Clearly these people have things they want to hide. But it's too much of a stretch to say they're therefore dong something wrong.
That said, I too will wait for the un-edited interview before I pass judgement on Mr Schmidy
It was just a quip - I didn't think for a minute anyone would take it literally.
Welcome the Internet. You'll find such subtleties often fail to come across in quite the way intended.
But you've gone and done so, conveniently ignored the rest of my points, and made it the entire base of your argument
I didn't disagree with the rest of your points. I even said as much (a point it seems
you are quite happy to ignore, BTW). I just thought one particular claim of yours was silly, overblown and misleading.
You've offered nothing to change my opinion in that regard.
Dialog boxes pop up half on one monitor, and half on the other, and I'm "doing it wrong"
If you're spending 6 hours out of every 8 fiddling with your monitor configuration, then
you are quite definitely doing it wrong. Beyond that, you keep your straw men to yourself.
In short, your productivity on a Linux box is inversely proportional to the number of monitors you've got hanging off it
Which would mean that if I had four monitors on my machine, I could only do one third as much work.
The only way it could be true would be if I were compelled to spend three quarters of my working day reconfiguring
my monitor setup,
every single day.
I hope I won't sound too much like a zealot for saying this,
but if that is your experience of Linux sir, then I humbly submit that you are doing it wrong.
I take your point that setting up multi-display systems could still be easier, but let's not be ridiculous.
And the fact that the government is mandating ANYTHING is a negative in my book
So presumably you're an anarchist, then? Repeal the laws against rape and murder - can't have the government telling us what to do. Might as well disband the police force since there's now nothing for them to enforce. Everyone can just buy a gun and defend themselves. It's a bit rough on the infirm and elderly, but on the bright side, they're not likely to live long enough to cause a problem, so maybe that's OK.
Or is it just that governments have no business telling corporations what do to?
I have noticed that a lot of libertarians don't appear to have a problem with laws like the DMCA. Maybe the ideal here is that corporations be above the law, since all a law is, is a government mandate. After all, financial deregulation has worked out so well recently.
It's just propaganda. The whole notion of a self-regulating free market working to the betterment of all is a myth.
I only brought it up to show that if you take this Godel number thing far enough, you can think of ANYTHING as merely "discovered".
Go on then: show me how you reduce a hydraulic jack to a Godel number.
But then mankind would be left with zero inventions (and zero original works of authorship).
More precisely, it might be left with zero abstract intellectual entities which qualified as inventions under patent law. That's not the same
thing as "zero inventions" or even "zero new ideas". It just means that abstractions would not be patentable. I can't see that as bad thing, myself.
As for "zero original works of authorship", I really do feel you are exaggerating shamelessly here.
People have been writing and creating since the dawn of time. Very few of them have needed patents
as an incentive. In fact, even in modern times, copyright has worked perfectly well for protecting
these things. Except of course in the area of allowing extremely large software corporations to
build thicket patents in order to discourage competition.
But that's not exactly an argument for software patents, either.
Just to clarify that: you wouldn't allow someone to get away with saying that since any particular book could be reduced to a static press machine that was patentable, it necessarily followed that arrangement for a specific book should likewise be patentable.
So does Martin Goetz though. For instance he argues about hardware implementations versus software implementations.
Implemented in hardware something would be patentable so if instead it's implemented in software it should also be patentable.
I know. PoIR does not, hence the confusion.
Implemented in hardware something would be patentable so if instead it's implemented in software it should also be patentable.
I know, but I can't say I agree with the argument. Supposing someone made a printing press that could only print one book. You'd give them a patent on the machinery that does the printing (setting aside prior art for a second) but not on arrangement of the letters. If someone later came along with a movable type press that could set any book, you wouldn't allow that since you could patent a press that printed any single book, you should also be able to patent books, since any book could be reduced to a static press that could be patented.
It's a bogus argument. The hardware ought to be patentable, sure. But if someone finds a way to move the software component out of the hardware, that ought not to be covered by patents.
So lose the infinte number of monkeys requirement. Othello remains a very long bit string; it's therefore arguable that it was discovered, in the mathematical sense of the term.
Regardless, Shakespeare still wouldn't be granted a patent on it today. Neither in theory nor in practice.
I honestly didn't read the entire thing because it is *very* long, but I skimmed it and the main point seemed to be that if only the lawyers/judges involved would learn "computational theory" then the correct solution (that software "should" not be patent-eligible) would be clear.
Fair enough. His point was then, broadly speaking, that any computer program is provably equivalent to a lambda calculus expression, and that lambda calculus expressions are themselves provably equivalent to Godel numbers, Turing machines and the pre-computing concept of "effective methods". Lambda calculus and Godel numbers are clearly mathematical entities and thus beyond patenting, and (IIRC) effective methods were also considered unpatentable.
To be fair, the article was written largely as a rebuttal to this line of argument:
This programming statement is discussed in a brief to the Supreme Court of the United States by Professor Hollaar and IEEE-USA. When arguing that software is not mathematics, the brief states39:
But in most instances, the correspondence between computer programs and mathematics is merely cosmetic. For example, the equation E = MC2 expresses a relationship between energy and matter first noted by Einstein, while the computer program statement E = M * C ** 2 represents the calculation of M time C raised to the second power and then assigning the result to a storage location named E. It is unfortunate for purposes here that the early developers of programming language made their calculation-and-assignment statements look like mathematical equations so that they would seem familiar to scientists and engineers. But the common programming statement I = I + 1, which increments the value stored in location I, is essentially nonsense as a mathematical equation. Similarly, a computer program is a series of calculation-and-assignment statements that are processed sequentially, not a set of simultaneous mathematical equations that are solved for their variables.
And so a lot of the effort goes into showing that software is mathematical beyond the superficial use of the equals sign in assignment. That's coming at the problem from a slightly different angle to the current discussion so I can see how the point might be missed.
Well, I think the main point he's making is that software programs are demonstrably equivalent to Turing machine, lambda calculus expressions and effective methods. Effective methods have never been patentable (I'm not sure if business method patents qualify however) and lambda calculus expressions are unquestionably mathematical expressions, and maths is not patentable.
However he, TFA writer Martin Goetz, argues software should be patentable.
He does indeed. The author I was referring to was PoIR in his post on Groklaw. I linked to it earlier in the discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
A good place to start, but I'd have to question the simplicity of the measure. For instance, the genuine inventor stands to be wiped out by fines that a multinational would pay out of petty cash. Politically, this would be very hard to implement.
I was thinking of DDOS attacks as well. The trouble here is that you can't just drop all the pending patent applications and start with empty pipes. Taking the time to do everything by the book would stall the entire process completely.
Now if you could limit the rate at which a submitter could apply, that might help ... assuming you can stop patents being filed by employees in their own name and simultaneously signed over to the company, for instance. It's also a bit rough on the genuine researcher who makes a single breakthrough that yields five genuinely patentable inventions.
Which doesn't mean the equilibrium point is necessarily reachable, of course. And if it is, there's no guarantee that the equilibrium level would be one that serves the purposes for which patents were designed. I can image a system where Microsoft, HP, IBM and a dozen other tech giants published perhaps a dozen high quality patents every year, but where no-one outside the group could afford to make a patent application, and no one could afford to licence any of these patents except as part of a cross licensing deal.
Which raises the question: So What?
Really, I don't care if they're going to attempt to resurrect Mother Theresa and invent a machine that will give Free Beer to Everyone, For Ever And Ever! If they try and do it by means of DRM, it's still a bad idea.
The question then is whether it is possible to put enough people and energy into maintaining the patent system.
Certainly it is to the advantage of those building IP thickets that the system should be overloaded. The less time the examiner has, the greater the chance of a spurious patent getting rubber stamped. So allocating resources to the patent office isn't necessarily going to help, since the system's abusers will likely increase the volume of submissions.
Worse, there's an asymmetry to the workload involved. Examining a patent should be a process of careful and painstaking research. That's not necessarily a problem when the patents being examined are the result of a similar painstaking effort. The trouble is that if the submitter doesn't care about novelty, then they can skip most of the research. This means that a bogus patent can be drafted and submitted with far less effort than that required to properly examine and reject same.
I don't think the system can be fixed by throwing money at it. I rather doubt it can be fixed at all.
So let me see if I have this straight: If I don't an iSlate I will be cast out from the society of people who spend all their time reading Twilight books in coffee shops?
Are there any drawbacks?
It's not illegal. You could make a case for it being anti-competitive, in the sense of "unfairly restricting competition" as opposed to "in violation of anti-competitiveness laws". I'm not sure I'd agree with such a position, but I don't think you can rule it out quite so blithely.
Actually, the GP can deem it howsoever he pleases. As can you and I. We probably aren't all in a position to take that deeming and have it enforced as a judge might in a court of law. But we're still entitled to make the judgement.
And after all, that's how laws get changed. If enough people deem a law unfair or incomplete, they lobby their representative. If enough people lobby, the law gets changed. We can deem whatever we please.
Well, Gnome# isn't a desktop environment, in the same sense as Gnome. It's just a set of C# bindings for the Gnome libraries. So no-one is running Gnome#; just Gnome with one or more components written in C#.
No, I'm saying that using Mono components in the Gnome desktop is a bloody stupid idea for anyone that isn't owned by Novell. If Red Hat don't use Mono on their Desktop (and currently it seems they don't) then there isn't a problem.
But as I mentioned in my last post, the point here is not "Red Hat sucks" and its not "Red Hat is Doomed". My point is "Using Mono for key infrastructure elements is a terrible strategy". I stand by that.
Thank you. A little effort can go a long way.
I agree. I'm not sure about the status of their support contracts which depend on the contested components, but in principle, I agree.
That doesn't follow. Think it through a bit further.
On the day Red Hat are forced to remove all Mono based components, they are faced with a dilemma. The need a desktop evironment: do they revert to the last clean Gnome release? Or do they adopt a different desktop environment (probably KDE) as standard?
Probably they'll do both. KDE will be fine for new custom, but RH are going to lose customers if that's the only DE on offer. Not because Gnome is better, but just because most of their corporate customers will not want to re-train staff to use the new environment. They'll look for one of the distros signed up to the MS patent pact and who can still offer and support an up to date Gnome desktop.
So the chances are RH will look to fork Gnome from some clean version in the past. The trouble there is that if MS time their move carefully, that could mean going back five, even ten years. So let's suppose they have to go back five years. And let's further assume that with a year of hard work, plus community support, they can retro-fit enough features to make up for two of those years. So two years, plus a year dev time puts them three years behind Novell. Of course Novell have been developing Gnome further in that year (using only C# so RH can't benefit from their efforts) meaning there's an effective lag of four years between Red Hat and SUSIE on the Gnome desktop. And with Novell as MS' corporate partners in this, they've probably had the advertising literature ready to capitalise on this since five minutes before MS make the announcement. That's one hell of a competitive edge.
So however you look at it, Red Hat stand to take a big hit in terms of paying customers and support contracts.
Now maybe they can survive unscathed, although it won't be without considerable blood, toil, sweat and tears. Maybe they'll continue in business, but marginalised. And maybe they'll not be able to maintain enough revenue, and will go under.
This isn't about "Red Hat is good" or "Red Hat is bad". It's about "why take such a bloody stupid risk, with so much to lose and so little to gain?"
However you look at it, a Mono based Linux desktop is a strategically stupid move.
Well exactly. But nevertheless, we've seen major retail chains that have somehow failed to stock the linux variations of some netbooks in favour of the windows ones; and we've seem OEMs that withdrew Linux based netbooks at the last moment before launch. Which suggests to me that MS have been active behind the scenes already.
There is a question as to how long they can keep it up, however.
Thank you for taking the time to argue your point so carefully.
That's exactly right. If Microsoft's own history shows one thing, over and over, it is that "cheap and good enough" will win out over "expensive, slick and over-engineered".
Of course, MS would be aware of this. So we'd expect them to try and leverage their market position to make linux netbooks go away, either by persuading retail chains not to stock them, or OEMs to stop selling them.
Hmmm....
It stands to kill the commercial distros, though. Red Hat certainly. Ubuntu, to the extent that it wants to operate in the US market, which is going to be probably the most lucrative for some time to come. The choice would be to pay tribute to Redmond, or to die.
SUSIE stands to do well as the flagship Microsoft vassal, but I think Microsoft would count it a win if they could bring about Linux' commercial consolidation into one big player with no new companies able to emerge. MS know how to compete with corporations.
Debian, might survive, although I expect MS lawyers could find ways of bringing pressure to bear on developers, and against Debian as a legal entity. More likely though, they'd be happy simply to see Linux eradicated from the corporate world. What people use on their desktops at work, they tend to want running on the computer at home. If you can dominate corporate America, you can lead the world. At least, I imagine that's the thinking in Redmond anyway.
I never really saw the sense in exposing ourselves to the risk of adopting a technology controlled by an organisation fundamentally opposed to all we stand for, and which offers few benefits, and nothing that can't be gained from other, unencumbered languages and frameworks. It's never seemed like sound strategy to me, except from Microsoft's viewpoint.
The sensible thing has always been to abandon it.
That's the way to go, I'd have said. Mention it in your CV so everything's clear from the start. Some employers will be put off, but some are going to see it as evidence of talent. You can expect to get some searching questions about it at interviews ... but it's better than hiding it, and having it come up on Google anyway.
The "publish a huge volume of information" approach could help as well, although depending how widely the file in question gets mirrored, you may never be able to hide it among the good stuff. Still, it can't hurt your job prospects to have a large positive online presence.
You don't need an embarrassing social disease to have a legitimate desire for privacy. Walk down any residential street: how many of the houses have curtains in the windows?
Clearly these people have things they want to hide. But it's too much of a stretch to say they're therefore dong something wrong.
That said, I too will wait for the un-edited interview before I pass judgement on Mr Schmidy
You know, I bet that happens to you all the time.
They say "if you can't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all". On that basis, I think I'm done talking to you. Have fun.
Welcome the Internet. You'll find such subtleties often fail to come across in quite the way intended.
I didn't disagree with the rest of your points. I even said as much (a point it seems you are quite happy to ignore, BTW). I just thought one particular claim of yours was silly, overblown and misleading. You've offered nothing to change my opinion in that regard.
If you're spending 6 hours out of every 8 fiddling with your monitor configuration, then you are quite definitely doing it wrong. Beyond that, you keep your straw men to yourself.
Which would mean that if I had four monitors on my machine, I could only do one third as much work. The only way it could be true would be if I were compelled to spend three quarters of my working day reconfiguring my monitor setup, every single day.
I hope I won't sound too much like a zealot for saying this, but if that is your experience of Linux sir, then I humbly submit that you are doing it wrong.
I take your point that setting up multi-display systems could still be easier, but let's not be ridiculous.
So presumably you're an anarchist, then? Repeal the laws against rape and murder - can't have the government telling us what to do. Might as well disband the police force since there's now nothing for them to enforce. Everyone can just buy a gun and defend themselves. It's a bit rough on the infirm and elderly, but on the bright side, they're not likely to live long enough to cause a problem, so maybe that's OK.
Or is it just that governments have no business telling corporations what do to? I have noticed that a lot of libertarians don't appear to have a problem with laws like the DMCA. Maybe the ideal here is that corporations be above the law, since all a law is, is a government mandate. After all, financial deregulation has worked out so well recently.
It's just propaganda. The whole notion of a self-regulating free market working to the betterment of all is a myth.
Go on then: show me how you reduce a hydraulic jack to a Godel number.
More precisely, it might be left with zero abstract intellectual entities which qualified as inventions under patent law. That's not the same thing as "zero inventions" or even "zero new ideas". It just means that abstractions would not be patentable. I can't see that as bad thing, myself.
As for "zero original works of authorship", I really do feel you are exaggerating shamelessly here. People have been writing and creating since the dawn of time. Very few of them have needed patents as an incentive. In fact, even in modern times, copyright has worked perfectly well for protecting these things. Except of course in the area of allowing extremely large software corporations to build thicket patents in order to discourage competition.
But that's not exactly an argument for software patents, either.
Just to clarify that: you wouldn't allow someone to get away with saying that since any particular book could be reduced to a static press machine that was patentable, it necessarily followed that arrangement for a specific book should likewise be patentable.
Didn't see the ambiguity until after I'd posted.
I know. PoIR does not, hence the confusion.
I know, but I can't say I agree with the argument. Supposing someone made a printing press that could only print one book. You'd give them a patent on the machinery that does the printing (setting aside prior art for a second) but not on arrangement of the letters. If someone later came along with a movable type press that could set any book, you wouldn't allow that since you could patent a press that printed any single book, you should also be able to patent books, since any book could be reduced to a static press that could be patented.
It's a bogus argument. The hardware ought to be patentable, sure. But if someone finds a way to move the software component out of the hardware, that ought not to be covered by patents.
So lose the infinte number of monkeys requirement. Othello remains a very long bit string; it's therefore arguable that it was discovered, in the mathematical sense of the term.
Regardless, Shakespeare still wouldn't be granted a patent on it today. Neither in theory nor in practice.
Arguably. He wouldn't be entitled to a patent on it, if it was written today, that's for certain.
Fair enough. His point was then, broadly speaking, that any computer program is provably equivalent to a lambda calculus expression, and that lambda calculus expressions are themselves provably equivalent to Godel numbers, Turing machines and the pre-computing concept of "effective methods". Lambda calculus and Godel numbers are clearly mathematical entities and thus beyond patenting, and (IIRC) effective methods were also considered unpatentable.
To be fair, the article was written largely as a rebuttal to this line of argument:
And so a lot of the effort goes into showing that software is mathematical beyond the superficial use of the equals sign in assignment. That's coming at the problem from a slightly different angle to the current discussion so I can see how the point might be missed.
He does indeed. The author I was referring to was PoIR in his post on Groklaw. I linked to it earlier in the discussion.