On Sun, 29 Feb 2004 21:46:23 -0300 Josenildo Marques disseminated the following:
Pretty funny, huh?
This is ridiculous ! And as I don't know anything about patenting I ask: Is it possible or lawfully right to patent something already created ?
Possible: of course. The US patent system is so out of whack it is a joke (see Carroll's post above).
Lawfully right: unless someone steps in and slaps the patent office upside the head, this will continue. There are no clear legislative guidelines, AFAIK, that restrict the granting of patents. If you want to fight a patent, you gotta go to court and show 'prior art'.
Ridiculous: Yes. Though the US patent process is not much more silly than the one they are now proposing in Europe.
As far as I am concerned, this is much more of a threat to Open Source and Free Software than anything SCO is concocting.
A patent is voided by the existence of "prior art" (the same is true for music copyrights - quite a few music graduates have been employed as legal assistants to dig out a tune by, say, Vivaldi which is the same as the one under dispute*). Virtual desktops have been around since the late 80s. There is no real threat, since were the patent to be granted, and were MS to try and enforce it, the guys at Sun would be rubbing their hands at another opportunity to sue MS.
Sir Robin
* Since Vivalidi wrote around 450 concertos, one need often look no further!
-- "Caesar non supra grammaticos." - Suetonius
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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