[Patents] Report on software patents.

[PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de]

>       Instead, consider the problem of natural language translation.
> I have yet to see a really good piece of software to do that.  Why?
> Because it is one of many software problems that are not "utterly
> trivial".

Same old stuff.
You already got answers to that assertion before.

To say it again: the non-triviality of the language translation exercise
does not lie in principles such as those that we see in software patents
but rather in putting a whole huge symphonic work together.  Music
development would have gained nothing if Wanger's "leitmotiv" had
infringed on Berlioz's "idee fixe".  If you believe that writing a Wagner
opera is simple, try to do it.

I know an institute that does nothing but building a dictionary that is
detailed enough to be useful in machine translation.  Patents won't reward
those people for anything.  Most of the work is somewhere in between.  In
any case, good programming ideas are not the scarce ressource that needs
"protection".

-phm