Steve Searle wrote:
Around 05:28pm on Sunday, July 08, 2007 (UK time), Les Mikesell scrawled:
Which still leaves open the question of how many times you have to pay
to license the same patent for the same device, or whether you can
rearrange the bits in one licensed program?
Never! As a user you do not buy a licence for the patent - you would
only do that if you were going to manufacturei (code) and distribute
something that uses the patented process. As a user you get a licence
to run the software (and maybe do other things with it, e.g. the GNU
licence).
That's the way it worked in the days before software (which you can
represent as a large string of bits or a number) was allowed to be
patented. The argument for permitting software patents is that the
software also represents a model of a process that could be covered when
running. My contention is that software is only in this covered state
when actually running on a device (otherwise its just a big number) and
that having any license to run the covered process on a particular
device should absolve any obligations to the patent holder even if you
modify that copy or replace it with different software that implements
the same covered (and previously licensed) process.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
