This might be interesting to some of you:

The newly granted patent US6625629 "System and method for signal processing 
using an improved convolution technique" owned by Microsoft, covers 
partitioned convolution. The patent was filed in May 2000, and granted in 
September 2003.

This is in most claims the same convolution algorithm previously patented by 
Lake Technology with priority date back in July 7 1992, US5502747. And that 
is in most claims the same algorithm as invented and published by Soo and 
Pang and others prior to 1992, which is the same algorithm used in my 
software BruteFIR.

Isn't the patent system wonderful? The requirements "new" and "non-obvious" 
were in practice scrapped a long time ago...

Anyway, Microsoft does as far as I know not have the tradition to harass free 
software developers as Lake has, so I don't think the fact that another one 
owns the partitioned convolution algorithm will cause any more trouble.

It would be interesting to know what Lake thinks about this. If Microsoft has 
patented it, they probably use it, and then Lake might want them to pay 
royalty, or else....

/Anders Torger

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