> Most of the nominal specialness attributed to software as a domain for intellectual property does not really exist.
Just rapid development and testing. Biotech, chemistry, hardware development are orders of magnitude slower.
But development and testing of anything is getting faster every year. Hardware development and testing is now hugely accelerated with FPGA design flow, for example, which feels a lot like software developmnent with crappy tools, to me. All fields' patent abilities will probably live or die eventually by whether software patents live or die. Maybe that's why Maskin ignores the rest.
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> Most of the nominal specialness attributed to software as a domain for intellectual property does not really exist.
Just rapid development and testing. Biotech, chemistry, hardware development are orders of magnitude slower.
But development and testing of anything is getting faster every year. Hardware development and testing is now hugely accelerated with FPGA design flow, for example, which feels a lot like software developmnent with crappy tools, to me. All fields' patent abilities will probably live or die eventually by whether software patents live or die. Maybe that's why Maskin ignores the rest.