"For over thirty years, software copyright has been a
succession of court cases and law review articles based on bad law,
bad logic, bad mathematics, and/or bad physics (Benson, CONTU,
Whelan and Altai being all of these). I have decided to write a
critical review arguing that software copyright (and dependents
like TRIPS, GPL, Bernstein, Junger) should be abolished in light of
17 USC 102b and its equivalents - for one reason - it is bad law
with no logical basis in the mathematics and physics of information
processing.
What follows is a list of over 90 Acts, decisions and law review
articles I will be critiquing in the review. A small number of
cases are from Asia and Europe, which inherited the problems of the
US cases.
Some cases deal with patents, for two reasons. One, any decision
detracting from software patentability feeds and supports
copyrightability. Second, the 1992 Altai case introduced a test for
software copyright that is nothing more than some patent procedures
without claims but using different words. The two domains have
become one, and should so be discussed."
