> That's the point - the government doesn't give you a license for discoveries, only for creative work.
Creative work is a discovery, and this is trivial to see: you can write a program to enumerate all possible English texts, and so discover every possible written work that has, can or will ever be made.
So it's more correct to say that the government gives you a license for certain kinds of discoveries, and the EFF are saying that this sort of work does not belong in the protected category. That's not entirely unreasonable from what I can see.
Creative work is a discovery, and this is trivial to see: you can write a program to enumerate all possible English texts, and so discover every possible written work that has, can or will ever be made.
So it's more correct to say that the government gives you a license for certain kinds of discoveries, and the EFF are saying that this sort of work does not belong in the protected category. That's not entirely unreasonable from what I can see.