Bevan, David wrote: > We recently received the following advice concerning these patents: > > "[During May] the patents expired in the UK and most of the world.
I am aware of the particular case of the US patents (files before 1996 so grant-date+17 as top date.) AFAIK, the other patents worldwide do not have similar rules, so protection is uniformly 20 years (assuming the fees are paid.) However, I am not a lawyer, and I do not understand which of the filing date or the anteriority/priority date applies when computing the duration of protection. Someone has (semi-) authoritative information about that? If we consider the UK patent GB2232861, according to http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/patent/p-os/p-find/p-find-number.htm, with the above reference as Publication Number, it was filed on 27.04.1990, but "priority [is] claimed [on] 08.05.1989 in United States of America" (this refers the US5155805 patent.) More surprinsing is that it seems from the web page referenced above that Apple paid the fees for one more year on 22.04.2009... And this page says as a conclusion "Status PATENT IN FORCE" (remember: it's the British IP Office: they might aim at collecting as much money as they can, but I would be surprised if they knowingly publish a page with a wrong status; and if the web server is brocken in such a way, I'd surprised too.) Antoine _______________________________________________ Freetype-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
