From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,a883dc07df0d6bb1 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: swhalen@netcom.com Subject: Re: Decoding an octet stream Date: 1999/12/02 Message-ID: <825g04$qri$1@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 555711914 References: <877lj2q36g.fsf@deneb.cygnus.argh.org> <81u247$kc3$1@hobbes2.crc.com> <821rc5$bim$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <822o4d$ehh$1@birch.prod.itd.earthlink.net> <8233fm$ngf$1@nntp3.atl.mindspring.net> <3845F5DB.4535A4BF@research.canon.com.au> Organization: ? User-Agent: tin/pre-1.4-19990517 ("Psychonaut") (UNIX) (SunOS/4.1.4 (sun4m)) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Geoff Bull 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 ...". 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 -- {===--------------------------------------------------------------===} Steve Whalen swhalen@netcom.com {===--------------------------------------------------------------===}