Re: Decoding an octet stream

[swhalen@netcom.com]

Geoff Bull <geoff@research.canon.com.au> wrote:
: 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?

...

: 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

(standard disclaimer: I Am Not a Lawyer, etc.)

Part of the problem is that it doesn't matter that _I_ know that this
is prior art and/or obvious. Only if I was sued by the patent holder
(or some other way got myself into court with lawyers and the whole
bit), would I have "standing" to _force_ the Patent Office to "listen"
to why I thought this particular application was obvious / prior art
...

In this case even though the general technique of creating a common
intermediate data format to reduce conversion hassles was done (even
by me!) as far back as the '70's, this patent was granted in the
context of "operating systems".

One would have to prove to the Patent Office that it was "obvious" to
extend such device / context independent data formats to operating
systems, and I'd have to prove what I'd done and when (I doubt I could
find the old code now, etc...).

This problem would go away if the Patent Office would take "our" word
for it, and we could just write in say "hey, kill that Patent, I did
that back <whenever> ...".  Unfortunately (but understandably) you have
to "prove" what you say, and some of what is getting patented now is
so obvious that nobody would have bothered to write papers about it or
otherwise document "it", because "it" was just a standard part of the
"art" of systems design or programming "back then".

The real problem is that these things get patented in the first place.
The Patent Office just doesn't have enough of the right kind of 
people examining these applications (and companies are patenting
everything in site as a defensive legal strategy).

Steve 

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                Steve Whalen     swhalen@netcom.com
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