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Many (most?) software developers believe that software shouldn't be patentable at all. Many also believe that copyright terms should be way shorter.

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They only believe this because this won't (immediately) affect their material prospects.

Or maybe they genuinely believe that the content they make today shouldn't be copyrighted for the next 100 years? Lifetime of the author +70 years is a very long time.

Given a binary choice between unemployability and extending patent protection to (even) snippets of code, I am quite confident that 90+% of salaried developers today will chose the latter.

thats not the argument we are discussing - the question is should these protections exist at all. We are talking about denying the artists all protection, only fair to confront developers with the same dialemma.

Whether they are 3 years or 300 is a finer point, and is only worth discussing after nessesity and legitimacy of sich protections is established

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