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crote • yesterday at 9:00 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

What annoys me the most is that they are so damn obvious! I can understand patenting the steam machine, but most software patents are simply the first solution which would come to mind to any developer encountering the same problem.

What's next, I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it?

Replies

matheusmoreira • yesterday at 11:22 AM

> I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it?

Absolutely.

Creative works are files in a computer, data. All data is information. All information is sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers.

I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count.

  digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2))

  digits(32)     = 10
  digits(64)     = 20
  digits(128)    = 39
  digits(256)    = 78
  digits(512)    = 155
  digits(1024)   = 309

  digits(20 KiB) = 49,321
  digits(2 GiB)  = 5,171,655,946
Intellectual property, copyright especially, is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. Humans are interesting number generators.

That's how absurd this system is.

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