As i said in a previous post, this is a very grey area.[1][2]
So much so that many of the granted patents are being opposed, and
until the outcome of these oppositions, neither one of us can comment
on the true legality of them.
I would suggest backing away from any such areas where software
patentability becomes an issue. Case law hasn't sufficiently
established the legality in my country, europe and many, many
territories.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents#In_Europe
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention#Inventive_step_tes
t
On 23 Mar 2007, at 10:02, Christian F.K. Schaller wrote:
It is an Urban Legend that there are no software patents in the EU.
True
enough there is no 'EU' software patents, but a lot of member
states do
have them. I suggest going the MPEG LA's webpage and looking at the
patent lists they have there for MPEG4. You will notice that a lot of
the patents are from EU countries.
Christian
On Fri, 2007-03-23 at 08:35 +0000, Gareth Hay wrote:
Not in the EU, no such thing as a software patent.
On 23 Mar 2007, at 04:55, Ian Hickson wrote:
On Fri, 23 Mar 2007, Robert Sayre wrote:
MPEG-4 is proprietary, because it is covered by patents.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but CSS is covered by
patents,
HTML is covered by patents, the DOM is covered by patents,
JavaScript is
covered by patents, and so forth. Proprietary technologies are
those that
are under the control of a single vendor. MPEG-4 is not proprietary.
It's not available under royalty free licensing. But it is not
under the
control of a single vendor. That is the important difference, not
whether
the technology is patented or not.
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