On Tue, 30 October 2001, Russell Nelson wrote: > Essentially, we are all of us completely and totally screwed by the > patent system. If I invent something that you have put into your > (unpublished -- at least as far as the patent system is concerned) > code for decades, and patent it, I 0WN J00. Doesn't matter if you're > IBM and I'm Joe Blow, or vice-versa even.
given: http://www.nolo.com/encyclopedia/faqs/pts/pct3.html#FAQ-294 =Patents must be novel (that is, it must be different from all =previous inventions in some important way). = =Patents must be nonobvious (a surprising and significant development) =to somebody who understands the technical field of the invention. I don't see how you could patent something that I've had in code for decades. It's neither nonobvious nor novel. Granted, software patents can be a pain (Some perl/tk widgets had to have functionality ripped out because they supported a patented image format) and, IMHO, stupid (the "one-click" patent from days gone by) but has the scenario you described actually happened? (i.e. decades old code getting patented out from under someone) Greg -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
