As others have said, it is not black and white. You can support patents on "things" and not patents on "ideas." There's a big difference.
I can tell you mathematically how a windmill grinds corn but that does not make my description into a windmill. On the other hand, laying down the mathematical description of a Judy Array IS the array itself!
Well, I'm against software patents pretty much as much as anyone here, as you can verify from my comment history, but describing the mathematics of an array isn't the same as the array itself. The patent isn't violated until you start executing that mathematics of a Judy Array on a running computer. Otherwise, you could violate a patent by just talking about it.
Comments
As others have said, it is not black and white. You can support patents on "things" and not patents on "ideas." There's a big difference.
I can tell you mathematically how a windmill grinds corn but that does not make my description into a windmill. On the other hand, laying down the mathematical description of a Judy Array IS the array itself!
Well, I'm against software patents pretty much as much as anyone here, as you can verify from my comment history, but describing the mathematics of an array isn't the same as the array itself. The patent isn't violated until you start executing that mathematics of a Judy Array on a running computer. Otherwise, you could violate a patent by just talking about it.
You're saying the description of how a windmill works is not a description of a windmill, while the description of how the array works is a array.
How is that true? Isn't a description a model [1], never the thing itself?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_model