[talmand]

I would agree with regular, every day patents describing mechanical inventions and the like. But show me software patents that show the actual code involved in producing the result. From what I've seen they usually have drawings showing the method and/or result. They do not show how it works.

It would be like a patent for a hand gun that has exterior drawings of the gun, a hand holding the gun/pulling the trigger, and then showing the bullet coming out of the barrel. No explanation of how the inner mechanism itself works. Therefore any other gun that works in a similar exterior manner but has a completely different inner mechanism would violate the patent.

That's my understanding of how most software patents are done.