Patent absurdity -- If patent law had been applied to novels in the 1880

What if patent law was applied to literature ? Its not a far strech when its applied to writting applications.
"Richard undertakes a gedankenexperiment about "literary patents" and the impact they would have had on Victor Hugo as he sat down to pen Les Miserables."

"A 2004 study of Linux, the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, found that it infringed 283 different US software patents. That means each of these 283 different patents covers a computational process found somewhere in the thousands of pages of source code of Linux."