Comment by Gibbon1
23 days ago
A friend that has a degree in engineering and law who works as a patent lawyer had this to say.
Interesting physical real world problems are NP hard. That's why we have patents. Software? You can work backwards from the requirements to multiple solutions almost always. Which is why patents on software are stupid.
Copyrights are originally to protect authors because an author might create a few dozen works over a lifetime. Of which a few mich actually be worth anything. Copyrights were to protect his income and allow him to leave an inheritance behind.
Copyrights for software is stupid because most of it is mechanically generated and it goes old like last weeks fish. Quote: The source code for Windows 3.1 who cares.
I wouldn't want to abolish software copyright completely, but we would all benefit if the copyright duration was much shorter for software. Something like 20 years. That would keep source code leaks of current software toxic, but make it possible to build on top of old software (like say the leaked Windows XP source)