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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

I am well aware of the foundations of CS and the lambda calculus, but this is more than a bit reductionist, like saying "everything is made of subatomic particles."

Patents on processes and methods are pretty common. Dismissing it as "they just patented some math" and then falling back to saying "oh, lambda calculus" -- I think you can do better :-)

But, yes, I'm sure the patents suck.

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B-frames (bi-directional predicted frames with a reference frame in both the past and the future) are patented. I'd say that's a process or method.

I don't feel like you were asking on good faith after this response.

Why should Free software advocates need to "do better" than to argue from literal first principles?

Fourier could call his transform a "process" all he wants, but that does not make it patentable.

So yes, "oh, math."

Almost all inventions can be reduced to "just math", because after all, that's what we use to describe the physical world, and oh also computer software things.

I'm not in favour of patents at all, but the entire "it's math" argument has always seemed exceedingly weak to me.

These files have carefully constructed format though. To read and write the patented format goes beyond patenting math. I think cmrdporcupine was getting at something.

Yep, it's not like I think the patent is just. I think software patents are mostly junk. But saying "because it's math" is highly uninformative.

First principles is fine, but where is the argument?

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