You're looking for a metaphor? A computer program is a theatrical
performance. What is a play? It's not the script, not the theater, not the
actors nor the sets or the lighting A play resides in the performance.
It's an event that causes responses in those who experience it. So, too, is
a computer program -- it is written as is a play by an artist whose talent
determines the elegance of the program. Or -- a computer program is a
musical performance. A song is an experienced event. So is a computer
program. The experience and the subsequent response need not be by a human,
it could be that of another computer, a machine, etc. How are performance
arts treated under the law? I know computer programs are considered
intellectual properties, but a "program" is no more what a computer program
is than a script is a play or a musical score is music.
I'm sure this is not at all what you're looking for, but so what? I had
fun.
Mike Geary Memphis
I have been struggling for years with the fact that many lawyers and, I presume, others have no idea of the nature of computer programs. Thus, for example, the trial judge in Junger---that's me---v. Daley claimed that the source code of a computer program "is a device, like embedded circuitry in a telephone."
Now computer programs have two aspects: (i) a text containing "instructions to a computer" and (ii) a process that occurs when those instructions are implemented.
Now, of course, neither the text nor the process are tangible things like the wiring in a computer. They are neither matter nor energy, but rather information. And not only are computer programs information, but so is the data that they process.
But it seems that most people---perhaps including myself---have no idea of what information is or how to describe it.
In the case of digital computers the program and data can always be viewed as being composed of numbers, but that just raises the question what is a number, especially when digital computers don't have any views about anything.
Do any of you have any suggestions?
I don't, by the way, think that it helps, for my purposes, to speak of numbers as Platonic ideas or to say that the number _n_ is the set of all sets containing exactly n elements.
Thanks, Peter -- Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH EMAIL: junger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx URL: http://samsara.law.cwru.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
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