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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 20 2012 @ 11:52 AM EDT |
This is important. To laymen, there's something almost
magical about the idea that a machine that's blindly
manipulating bits can result in, say, Facebook. To
oversimplify, if it's magical, it must be patentable. i.e.,
I don't understand it, therefore it's non-obvious. (And it
must be novel, since Facebook never existed before...)
There really *is* a gap between the *potential* of a
general-purpose computer, and the realization of that
potential in practical applications. That gap is the work
of programmers. The way to approach judges is not to say
that "we the computer theorists think that programming is
trivial on theoretical level" - judges won't care about a
theory that discounts the very existence of the enormous
industry that is software. We need to say "here is the kind
of work that we the programmers do within the industry every
day - the work that creates a one-click shopping cart, for
example, and here is how this work is different from
inventing the light bulb or finding a new drug. And by the
way, here are all the ways that patents are killing our
industry."[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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