[Foundation-l] [offtopic] Lempel-Ziv Was: Freedom, standards, and file formats

[Geoffrey Plourde]

What about a tabulator? 




________________________________
From: Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 8:01:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [offtopic] Lempel-Ziv Was: Freedom, standards, and file formats

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 09:19:05PM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> It's true that math is not itself patentable in the US.  The way
> software patents are constructed is by saying: "We claim a computer
> system (a) consisting of transistors and all the usual computer
> trappings, which is loaded with software (b), which tranforms the
> computer into a device for performing computation (c; described in
> great detail), so that the resulting system a+b+c, is useful for
> performing task X", and that *is* patentable in the US,  the patents
> usually go on to describe every application that they can think of, as
> well as the most obvious permutations of a,b, and c.

Would the patent still apply if I used a babbage difference engine,
or an optical computer? 

My question is really: how specific are they in describing a computer?


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