Re: [Patents] That Article

[Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>]

>I therefore propose to forget about terms such as "idea vs expression"

You can't forget such terms when they are the language of multiple
global copyright and IP treaties.

>Of course it does not.  Copyright works well in the software field
>as everyone working there knows.

One of the major reasons that software patenting took off in the 1990s
in the United States was the growing recognition then that software
copyright was becoming increasingly impotent for anything beyond
executables (i.e. pure piracy).  As the idea/expression dichotomy
starts becoming part of European caselaw, the same thing will happen
in Europe

Copyright fundamentally does not protection functionality.  Software is
fundamentally functionality.  The two will always be opposed.
Worse, copyright software lasts an insane period of time (> 100 years),
and copyright law discourages sharing to some extent (to claim independent
creation and avoid infringement, you have to ignore all other similar
programming efforts).

Greg