Read this, punks

http://www.ipjur.com/01.php3

Hey punks, have you ever heard of FPGAs or ASICs ?

What if I implement my “software patent” in FPGA or betetr yet as an ASIC design ?

Is ASIC software ? Certanly not, it is hardware

So if you want to leave silicon hardware patentable but make software that runs on it unpatentable you are creating a huge conceptual problem without solution
It’s just not doable – there is no clear line between software and hardware implementation
The only solution would be to make all silicon hardware unpatentable but it’s not gonna happen, my dear little patentless punky friends
Have a nice night, fellas

You are saying that you do not care what the customer wants, and that you propose to order the customer to buy a new computer even if he does not want one, so that you can get paid. I am reminded of a Russian actress I once knew, who once said, unthinkingly, that the commissars should compel the people to come to the theater. She had emigrated in the Jewish Emigration of the 1970’s, but she had carried a little something with her, and when she recognized that in America, there isn’t a very great demand for stage actresses, she let her feelings be known. Of course, a really beautiful woman can get away with all kinds of things…

Here is a rather brutal fact. My year of maximum computer expenditure in absolute dollars was 1989, and in inflation-adjusted dollars, it was 1985. Since then, computers have gotten cheaper, faster than I could find new uses. I am writing this on my old computer, my legacy computer, my “don’t-fix-it-if-it-isn’t-broken” computer, which I would estimate has a fair market value of fifty dollars, exclusive of the screen. Word processing and websurfing are not high-data-rate applications. The new computer is for experimenting with things, starting with Linux. I’ve got Blender on the new computer, but Blender is extremely complicated to learn, and I haven’t been able to find the time to really _study_ it, and memorize a couple of hundred different keycodes. I was ahead of the vast majority of the population, but they will catch up, and reach their own level of computer saturation.

The Supreme Court knows who George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), was, and, apparently, you do not. He was an approximate contemporary of Michael Romanov, if that puts him in your framework. As the prime minister of England, Buckingham induced the king to grant all kinds of monopolies on the making of common articles to Buckingham and his friends. The first English patent law was a response to Buckingham’s abuses. The evolved consensus of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is that special legal privileges should not be granted if there is a reasonable alternative, and that, the broader the legal privilege, the more caution is indicated. You are arguing against four hundred years of constitutional history. Those four hundred years represent the difference between America and Russia. The Justices of the Supreme Court cannot ignore the reality of Open-Source Software, of the fact that very large numbers of people are writing programs and giving them away. There is also an “Open Cores” movement, building up a corpus of Verilog code, development tools, etc. You may say that these are not very good at present, but of course they will get better, just as Open Source Software grew from modest beginnings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Villiers,_1st_Duke_of_Buckingham