A claim on a combination of elements in which one element is an iterative component is not the same as claim on all iterative components everywhere.
Anyone who thinks that licensing will have an effect on what is happening in reality is severely misguided.
Free and open sound good to me! What do they mean exactly? I guess it’s a non-debatable fact that copyrights and patents are abused by many big companies and patent trolls, but doing away with the system does seem extreme, it has also protected deserving individuals on occasion, no? You are saying that it should always be legal to copy someone else’s code / inventions without giving them any credit or compensation?
> Anyone who thinks that licensing will have an effect on what is happening in reality is severely misguided.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean; lots of licensing activity does have a measurable effect on reality. This article is only a small example, but people get sued all the time over taking code and using it without licensing it.
Too late, patents pick up where copyright ends, to protect general algorithmic ideas, not just implementations. And we have lots of patents on things that seem trivial now, including for-loops (just see how many patents depend on “a multiplicity”). Look - here’s a helpful lawyer’s template for including for-loops as a claim in your own patents: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/recursive-and-iterative...
Another example is the famous XOR patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US4197590/en
EFF keeps a blog on stupid patents https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month