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From: Geoff Bull <geoff@research.canon.com.au>
Subject: Re: Decoding an octet stream
Date: 1999/12/02
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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