IANAL, but I would hazard that you are wrong on nearly all points. There are very specific rules on the form of a patent application. It used to be/may still

IANAL, but I would hazard that you are wrong on nearly all points. There are very specific rules on the form of a patent application. It used to be/may still be that you had to include stylized drawings of a machine that accomplished the function. Ten thousand pages of code wouldn't cut it. Generally the patent is abstracted from the actual machine. A couple of the problems with software patents is that the abstraction is too great and the claims are too broad. It's the claims that trip up future developers. The musician example is pretty much bogus, because method patents have been pretty much disallowed, though there is a movement to get them accepted. Method/process patents would bring all innovation to its knees. Also a misconception about copyright. You can have a copyright without publishing the code, although if you publish it without a copyright, it may be in the public domain. Code copyright is used as a defense against duplication, not innovation. > Similarly.. Yes indeed.