The equivalence of patents and source code

The Software Freedom Law Center has filed a Supreme Court brief re Bilski, and I loved this idea within it:

“The source code of a program which performs the steps described in a software patent is distinguishable from the literal patent only in that it expresses the same steps in a different language. Therefore, since anyone may copy or publish the actual patent without infringing, it must also be permissible to communicate its claims in source code form.”