From: Geoff Bull <geoff@research.canon.com.au>
Subject: Re: Decoding an octet stream
Date: 1999/12/02
Date: 1999-12-02T04:25:24+00:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <3845F5DB.4535A4BF@research.canon.com.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 8233fm$ngf$1@nntp3.atl.mindspring.net
swhalen@netcom.com wrote:
> From the U.S. Patent Office server (http://www.uspto.gov/):
>
> United States Patent 4,956,809
> George , et al. September 11, 1990
>
> Method for canonical ordering of binary data for
> portable operating systems
> Assignee: Mark Williams Company (Chicago, IL)
> Filed: December 29, 1988
> our Patent Office has no clue as to what consitutes
> "prior art" or is "obvious" (at least in the software
> field).
>
> Many patents have been issued in the last few years
> that have been used widely in the past and/or were
> obvious to me many years ago, and I've only been
> programming for about 30 years...
If you can produce evidence of prior art, a patent is
invalid. This particular patent covers an idea present
in Sun's XDR. As you can see from the following, XDR
dates back to 1986, so it seems "the patent" (not being
filed until 1988) is invalid. Does anybody know when
XDR actually became public knowledge?
From /usr/include/rpc/xdr.h :
/*
* Copyright (c) 1986 - 1991, 1994 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
* All rights reserved.
*/
/*
* xdr.h, External Data Representation Serialization Routines.
*
*/
I still don't understand what constitutes "obvious" in
the patent law sense, but, at least in retrospect, the
Mark Williams patent is obvious.
Cheers
Geoff
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1999-12-02 0:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 39+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1999-11-28 0:00 Decoding an octet stream Florian Weimer
1999-11-29 0:00 ` David C. Hoos, Sr.
1999-11-30 0:00 ` Florian Weimer
1999-12-03 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1999-12-01 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1999-12-01 0:00 ` David C. Hoos, Sr.
1999-12-01 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1999-12-07 0:00 ` Stefan Skoglund
1999-12-01 0:00 ` swhalen
1999-12-01 0:00 ` Larry Kilgallen
1999-12-01 0:00 ` Kenneth Almquist
1999-12-02 0:00 ` Geoff Bull
1999-12-02 0:00 ` Stupid patent tricks (was: Decoding an octet stream) Ted Dennison
1999-12-06 0:00 ` Decoding an octet stream Kenneth Almquist
1999-12-01 0:00 ` Florian Weimer
1999-12-02 0:00 ` Geoff Bull
1999-12-02 0:00 ` Lutz Donnerhacke
1999-12-02 0:00 ` Ted Dennison
1999-12-02 0:00 ` tmoran
1999-12-02 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1999-12-02 0:00 ` Geoff Bull [this message]
1999-12-02 0:00 ` swhalen
1999-12-02 0:00 ` Larry Kilgallen
1999-12-03 0:00 ` swhalen
1999-12-04 0:00 ` Geoff Bull
1999-12-06 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1999-12-04 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1999-12-03 0:00 ` Geoff Bull
1999-12-06 0:00 ` Richard D Riehle
1999-12-06 0:00 ` Ed Falis
1999-12-07 0:00 ` Ted Dennison
1999-12-08 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1999-12-08 0:00 ` Brian Rogoff
1999-12-02 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1999-12-08 0:00 ` Numeric types Mario Amado Alves
1999-12-08 0:00 ` Tucker Taft
1999-12-01 0:00 ` Decoding an octet stream Robert Dewar
1999-12-01 0:00 ` Geoff Bull
1999-12-01 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
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