One problem is the junk patent which is far too vague and covers obvious
developments and covers prior art. Two perl modules come to mind right
off "Storeable" and "Data::Dumper";, I'm sure there are other serialization
modules in C libraries or even Pascal if one wants examples going back to
the 80's or late 70's.
The other is the general problem of sw patents. Which cost millions to
over turn. There was a conference on the topic in Brussels last year in
November and the lawyers there indicated that based on actual costs, it
runs about $4 million to throw out a bad patent. So what it alsmost comes
down to is a contest of which team has more money.
SW Patents are a threat to *all* small and medium businesses. SMB is
anything with < 1 billion per year -- so that means pretty much all
European business. And most of those don't have a spare $4 million every
quarter to throw out the bad patents.
A third problem is that MS is putting on a huge marketing / mindshare
campaign right now and is doing everything possible to distract or
confuse the public in regards to OpenOffice and OpenDocument.
-Lars
Lars Nooden ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Software patents harm all Net-based business, write your MEP:
http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/ep6/owa/p_meps2.repartition?ilg=EN
On Wed, 1 Jun 2005, Alex wrote:
Now having re-read the proper patent. I still don't see how they could be
awarded a patent on what appears to be nothing more that converting a data
structure defined in one file to a serial stream in another file. Sounds
like storing a record in a database to me. :-\ I think Borland was doing
this back in the early 90s in BP7, storing object instances on a data stream.
I'll have to check on that. But it seems so overly simple. Like someone
getting a patent on how you dump cerial into a bowl in the morning changing
its format and then back into the box when you change your mind. You've done
it thousands of times and now someone comes along and gets a patent on it.
Wouldn't this procedure be considered in the public domain?
Alex Janssen
Sander Vesik wrote:
So please englighten us, what about the patent is all that old?
you seemto be seeing just soe fragments and not teh whole - recognising
well-known
tree species but not that you have wondered up to a forest you havne't seen
before
;-)
Its not that teh patent is something incredibly novel or innovative or that
parts of
it (or possibly all) probably won't be upheld in court or that there
definitely
won't be prior art - its just that it is not (as far as software patents go
in this
regard) somehow entirely bogus or preposterous or would cover all (or even
a
fraction of) computer-computer communication as people have been claiming.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
