I agree the example is clumsy because people will find it hard in that example to imagine why a novel is patentable (because it is obviously not in our world, ironically lacking the criteria of being "novel"!)

I felt like notch matured a while ago but this is a surprisingly childish rant from him, i honestly felt it was a bit below him. He has a point, a valid point, but he has not conveyed it very well, and has caused collatoral damage to other valid fields for patents in the process of criticizing software patents.