Z:gnu-www-ja-moglen-harvard-speech-2004--9e8c65-Patent law in the 21st century/en

Patent law in the 21st century is a collection of evil nuisances. There's no question about it. And in the world of software where we exist, there are some particularly unfortunate characteristics of the way that the patent law works. We are going to have to work hard to make sure that the legitimate scope of patent, which is present, but which is small, is not expanded by careless administrators any further in the course of the 21st century to cover the ownership of ideas merely because those ideas are expressed in computer programming languages rather than in, say, English or mathematics.