Yeah that's a goodie. Rereading, I was struck by this quote about the patent office: (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/did-my-broth...)Today, people are filing patents, claiming that they just invented something which we had running back in the 1960s. How can that happen? Well, the patent office looks only at previous patents to see whether or not there is a prior claim. Of course, there are no patents from the 1960s, because they wouldn’t allow them. You were supposed to send the patent office not just a description, but a hardware implementation. Basically the notion of patenting something meant you carried to the office a model of the thing you were building, the thing that you had invented. And this just doesn’t work with software. So they had, for a long time, declared software as an unpatentable thing. Eventually, they decided that there is indeed intellectual property here, but it was quite a while later.