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Comment by marshray | Hacker News Reader

A valiant attempt. I hope it really does contribute to this and all software patents being struck down for the foolishness that they are.

I kind of doubt it though. Even if the law says mathematics isn't patentable, and all programs on Turing equivalent systems are provably reducible to pure mathematics, it won't matter. Those who run the legal industry will just invent whatever bad laws and rulings they need to enable it to continue sucking the life out of those who are actually trying to produce things of value.

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I like to think that if things were explained in simple enough terms, judges would understand and it would have to go forward. This feels like a 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' quantity of optimism. Still, a guy can dream.

Surely the FSF has tried to argue this in court.. right?

Look at the RSA algorithm for example. As pure a mathematical beast as there ever was. Many folks wanted that formula opened up, but I don't know how many even got a fair hearing to argue about it. It held until it expired.

> Look at the RSA algorithm for example. As pure a mathematical beast as there ever was.

The RSA patent wasn't on the math. It was on using that math to do something specific.

The RSA patent didn't apply to other uses of that math.

Obviously, they didn't try to patent the Chinese Remainder Theorem, or any other previously existing mathematical algorithm.

But, as the top-level comment and the original post point out,

> ...any method of manipulating information (i.e an algorithm) can be translated into a Haskell program, every Haskell function is a formula in the Typed Lambda Calculus, and all the variants of the Lambda Calculus are part of mathematics.

The RSA patent doesn't provide source code per se, but it definitely describes a particular algorithm which could be transcribed to lambda calculas.

> The RSA patent doesn't provide source code per se, but it definitely describes a particular algorithm which could be transcribed to lambda calculas.

Yes, but "transcribed to lambda calculus" does not imply that RSA isn't unpatentable any more than "can be translated to Japanese".

Note that you can't patent chemistry, molecules, or forces of nature either. However, no one confuses that with patenting the use of said things for specific applications.

Why do you think that math is different?

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