User talk:Gabriel Bouvigne

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Welcome!

Hello, Gabriel Bouvigne, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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[edit] "MP3 patents are technically not software patents"

In what way? – Smyth\talk 14:11, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

They are patents on processes, according to their wording. They might be implemented by software, but also by electrical devices, so they are not inherently software-related. I agree that in today's world they will be implemented in software in more than 99.99% of the cases, but they still stand legally, software or not.--Gabriel Bouvigne 12:42, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

If a patent covering a complex data-manipulation algorithm is not a software patent, then what is? – Smyth\talk 16:16, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree, but mp3 or aac related patents are clearly not such patents, if you read them. --Gabriel Bouvigne 10:17, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

No, that was a literal question. What would you consider an example of an actual software patent? – Smyth\talk 17:11, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Quicksort/bubblesort would be software patents, in my opinion. "Taking two input signals, summing them to create a first new signal, creating a second new signal as a difference of the two input signals, and use a device to transmit those two new signals, then recreating the two original signals from within a reception device" or something like that would not be a software patent to me (except if you consider turntables and fm radio receivers to be pieces of software).

Surely it is infinitely easier to implement bubblesort in hardware than MP3? I can almost picture a mechanical device passing back and forth along a line of things, repeatedly comparing neighbours. :) – Smyth\talk 15:35, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

It's not because something is algorithmical that it can not be implemented using hardware devices. You are reversing things there. The point is that the patents covering mp3 are not describing algorithms. They are also not describing specifically mp3. I think that you did not actually studied those patents, am I right? --Gabriel Bouvigne 07:48, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

I've just taken a look at US patent 5,579,430, which describes taking a PCM stream, transforming it into the frequency domain, quantizing the coefficents according to some requirements, and then encoding it with some general-purpose compression method. I would argue that this does describe an algorithm, or rather a very large set of algorithms with different choices of the implementation details left unspecified.

You didn't answer my point about bubblesort. If you define a software patent as one that cannot possibly be implemented except with software, do such patents actually exist? – Smyth\talk 12:53, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

This patent (5,579,430) is a little more complex, as it also includes a kind of entropy coding (a VLC), some stuff about synchronisation, code tables and gain. As you noticed, this could be interpreted as a large set of cascaded algorithms. But what is covered by this patent is not those individual algorithms, it's the whole process of using already known pieces, but in a specific order. This is called a process, not an algorithm. (btw it's nice that you took some time to start reading one of those patents).
Regarding software implementation and algorithms, it's clear that an algorithm is not something that can only be implemented in software. But on the other hand, it's not because something can be implemented in software that it's automatically considered to be an algorithm as a whole, even if it might include some algorithms in some parts. Is a word processor an algorithm? I don't think so (but I agree that a word processor is not a process either)--Gabriel Bouvigne 13:40, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

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