Knuth's stake on patents

[Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>]

Page seven of <http://www.ams.org/notices/200203/fea-knuth.pdf>, last 
question.
Mirrors from slashdot: <http://russnelson.com/fea-knuth.pdf> and
<http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~ajay/fea-knuth.pdf>.

From pdftotext with slight (mis)reformating:

<<
   Question: What is your thinking about
software patents? There is a big discus-
sion going on in Europe right now about
whether software should be patentable.
   Knuth: I'm against patents on things
that any student should be expected to
discover. There have been an awful lot
of software patents in the U.S. for ideas
that  are  completely  trivial,  and  that
bothers me a lot. There is an organiza-
tion that has worked for many years to
make patents on all the remaining triv-
ial ideas and then make these available
to  everyone.  The  way  patenting  had
been  going  was  threatening  to  make
the software industry stand still.
   Algorithms  are  inherently  mathe-
matical  things  that  should  be  as  un-
patentable  as  the  value  of  .  But  for
something  nontrivial,  something  like
the interior point method for linear pro-
gramming,  there's  more  justification
for somebody getting a right to license
the method for a short time, instead of
keeping  it  a  trade  secret.  That's  the
whole idea of patents; the word patent
means "to make public".
   I was trained in the culture of mathematics, so
I'm not used to charging people a penny every time
they use a theorem I proved. But I charge somebody
for the time I spend telling them which theorem
to  apply.  It's  okay  to  charge  for  services  and
customization and improvement, but don't make
the algorithms themselves proprietary.
   There's an interesting issue, though. Could you
possibly have a patent on a positive integer? It is
not inconceivable that if we took a million of the
greatest supercomputers today and set them going,
they could compute a certain 300-digit constant
that would solve any NP-hard problem by taking
the GCD of this constant with an input number, or
by  some  other  funny  combination.  This  integer
would  require  massive  amounts  of  computation
time to find, and if you knew that integer, then you
could do all kinds of useful things. Now, is that
integer really discovered by man? Or is it something    
that is God given? When we start thinking of com-       
plexity issues, we have to change our viewpoint as      
to what is in nature and what is invented.              
>>

--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>