On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Steve Richfield <[email protected]> wrote:
> There is a fine line here. As I am reading this, it isn't so much "prior art", > but lying on the patent application where every inventor must sign under > penalty of perjury that they are the original inventor. This isn't so much a > civil issue of prior art, but a criminal issue of perjury. Of course the USPTO > is too busy to put the patent crooks in jail, and the patent crooks know it, > so this practice continues. It was just easier to recognize your "prior art" > than to go to the hassle of a criminal proceeding. Well, I'm pretty sure that plagiarism would be a civil matter (copyright infringement). But why bother? It is easy to prove prior art. http://web.archive.org/web/20000815000000*/http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/ > An alternative approach might have been to contact them and offer a > technology trade - your technology (that they already have) in return for a > half-interest in the patent (that they doubtless paid plenty of money to > get). Well, no. First of all, they were crooks. http://www.c10n.info/archives/415 Second, patenting a data compression algorithm will kill any chance that anyone will ever use it. The deflate algorithm is used everywhere: zip, gzip, png, pdf, docx, etc. because it is free, open source, and not patented so anyone can use it. Same with JPEG. On the other hand, there are patented compression algorithms like szip and CTW that compress much better but nobody uses them. One legacy of the patent on arithmetic coding (now expired) is that that portion of the JPEG standard was never implemented, even though the compression would have been about 10% better. Likewise, the original version of bzip used arithmetic coding, but was modified to Huffman coding in bzip2, which compressed worse but wasn't patented. You might wonder why I would spend years to develop a new algorithm, publish it open source (GPL) and refuse to patent it. Well, the early versions of PAQ were mediocre until other people started making changes to the code. As it neared the top of the benchmarks, more people took notice. Now there are over 20 authors. It would not have gotten where it is without their help, and I would not have gotten their help if it were closed source, proprietary, or patented. It did win a small amount of prize money in 2004 in the Calgary challenge, which I donated back to the contest. All of the entries since then are variants of my program developed by others. http://mailcom.com/challenge/ That is also true of the Hutter prize. I'm not eligible because I am on the prize committee. http://prize.hutter1.net/ You might be wondering why I would be happy to let other people win prize money with my code. Because it makes my code better. As a result, I was recruited for a job where I now make 20 times what I need to live on, working at home on my own hours, doing what I would probably be doing anyway as a hobby. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
