Steve Harris wrote:
>Prior art doesn't seem to be very useful in defending against patents for
>some reason (IANAL of course). The recent British Telecom v's W3C fiasco
>was won on the grounds that the BT patent's system operated in a different
>way to the Web, rather than because of prior art (which there is plenty
>of).
otoh, a patent needs to express a new idea afaik. the technique
of buffering before playback is applied to 'slow' data providers
on a regular basis -- all the .mp{1-4}, .ra, .mov, .avi, .swf etc
players do exactly the same thing when playing from a http host,
and they've been doing this for a long time now.
in this light, claiming the patented idea is either original or
new is nonsensical.
tim
