And frankly, I make my living writing the stuff. Imagine a patent on a do loop? Uh, programming would have ended before it began. Lame and stupid.
>Patent #4,197,590 covers the concept of an "XOR cursor". In the early days of windowing systems (especially with bitonal displays), it was common to represent your cursor as a small bitonal bitmap. When you want to display the cursor, you exclusive-or (XOR) it into the pixels of the desktop. This insures that the cursor is always visible: the cursor is black on white, or white on black. And when you wish to hide or move the cursor, you XOR it again, and the original image is restored. Fairly obvious. But if you write the code, you are in violation of patent #4,197,590.This has also been interpreted to include using Exlusive-Or (XOR) to invert any text character for highlighting purposes, such as marking text for deletion, copying, or moving. It's patented. Gee... wasn't that the technique used on most monochrome computer monitors to highlight text?
AbstractIf you use your laser pointer to play with your cat, you are infringing this Patent Granted on August 22, 1995. I was playing with my cats with a laser pointer at least five years before this patent was applied for... talk about prior art.
A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.
Then, there's this 2002 Patent: No: 6368227 "Method of Swinging on a Swing," which must have been issued by a patent examiner who never had kids or was a kid or never sat on a swing...
Abstract
A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.
Patent law requires a patent to be an expression of a concept or idea. If that expression is generally known (such as a do loop) it is considered to be in the public domain and thus not patentable. Copyrights address nonfunctional expressions of an idea, i.e. static creations that do not operate to produce anything, but rather whose existence alone is protected from imitation. So copywriting code because it is written like copyrighted writings is an incomplete application of the legal concept, because the value of code is what it produces, but the way it produces is in it's individual expression. So it always has seemed to me that unique code should be both patentable and copyrightable. And distinguishing between "generally known" expressions and "unique" expressions is the field of patent law.