[Patents] mental acts x software

[Xavier Drudis Ferran xdrudis@tinet.org]

Francois PELLEGRINI va escriure el Thu, 19 Oct 2000 09:17:00 +0200  :
>
>    No, no, compress algorithms can be performed by humans too !
>
Sure. I remember having read a book where one author explains how he taught
his little daughter a dictionary based compression code in very litttle time, 
and she was quite
good at performing it, with pen and paper. Or was it that she invented it 
herself?. I don't 
remember...
 
I only have this reference, but I think it was a later edition :
              Ian H. Witten, Alistair Moffat, and Timothy C. Bell
              Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and 
Images
              Van Nostrand Reinhold
              1994
              ISBN 0-442-01863-0
              Library of Congress catalog number TA1637 .W58 1994

> [Morse...]   Looks like Huffman coding, don't you think ?            8^)
>
Yes, indeed.

Anyway, deciding what is technical and what is not is impossible for me, 
maybe because I'm 
no lawyer nor judge and I'm used to work with less ambigous definitions than 
the ones used in 
law. I can't see why a spell-checking algorithm is less technical or more 
"mind process" than 
a compression algorithm. I guess that's why it takes law professionals and 
institutions to interpret 
law. 


--
Xavier Drudis Ferran
xdrudis@tinet.org