Software as Knowledge
Richard Stallman has compared software with books, the comparison seems fair, both are the result of creative processes by human beings, computer language code is no more than the expression of ideas in a "foreign" language.

For some unknown reason, code seems to be treated differently in law tho'.

If you read a book, and then wrote a book that had similar themes, as long as you don't plagiarise the original book, that's perfectly legal. Unusual figures of speech and clever language idioms can be reused in books, but not in code, because someone can patent coding tricks.

Patents are not like copyright, where you can only infringe knowingly, patent registration grants the holder much stronger protection against anyone using their ideas, even if those ideas are independently developed or improvements on already known techniques.

For the moment the European Union is holding back on allowing enforcement of Software Patents, but given the Americanisation of the UK, you can be sure that sooner or later the subject will be given the Blair/Bush treatment, I only hope that the rest of Europe can see that the only sure thing is that software patents would be abused, more than likely by large US multi-nationals.
- posted by bigkevmcd @ 4:36 AM