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SubjectRe: Article: IBM wants to "clean up the license" of Linux
	I have one small thing to say on this whole patent spew.
A long while ago Slashdot seemed to have a thing with some odd
tidbits that where worth reading. One of them was an article
about some odd patents .. one of which as as recent patent on
.. brace your self .. the wheel.

I can't for the life of me remember the patent number, but I
remember reading it and fell over laughing that the patent office
let something like it through. Circular object connected to a
center point via spokes. Then it when on to define spokes,
everything from one or more spokes ( I interpretted their deffinition
of a single spoke as a disk ).

In light of that patent ..... it's all a joke somehow .. the patent
office, the copywrites, the politics ..

Monkeys throw shit around to mark their territory, humans throw
ink around. What's the difference? it's all shit anyway.

On Mon, Dec 21, 1998 at 09:08:25AM -0500, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> On 21 Dec 1998, Michael Shields wrote:
>
> > In article <19981220154531.A17409@hazel>,
> > Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com> wrote:
> > > Wait till products have been out for a while and only
> > > sue the big-money makers.
> >
> > It doesn't work like that; you need to protect your patent against all
> > infringers, or you can lose it.
> > --
> > Shields.
> >
>
> No. That's a Copyright. A Patent is yours for 17 years. You can ignore
> it, give away rights, sell rights, assign it, etc., anything you want.
>
> Someone may try to declare it as invalid, perhaps obvious, and use
> your idea. In such cases both parties generally "agree to disagree" and
> cross-license so both can use the invention.
>
> There is too much misinformation about Patents going on here. This
> comes about from the College influence where students are taught
> that knowledge should be "free to everyone". This is a truly strange
> idea considering that the typical College Student has to pay upwards
> of $50,000 to obtain this "free knowledge"!
>
> When you work in industry, a company may spend over a million dollars
> in software development for some "simple" product. They don't want
> the competition to get off free and produce the same product without
> having to incur the same kind of development costs. Therefore the
> company that invested the money tries to patent as much "intellectual
> property" as possible.
>
> There are rules about what can be patented. You can't patent mathematics,
> but you can patent an algorithm, presuming it passes the other tests such
> as being non-obvious, etc. Software patents fall under the idea
> of an algorithm, and are not really "software". The letters patent
> application has to be stated in such a way that it is truly portable.
>
> In other words, using 'mov eate first personal computer bulletin board system. 1982 William,ebx' as a NOP is not patentable.
>
> In industry, the most common patent is an "improvement" upon something
> that already exists. These are easy to defend because you specifically
> state "prior art" and try to show how your invention is not obvious
> to those skilled in the art.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Dick Johnson
> ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
> Penguin : Linux version 2.1.131 on an i686 machine (400.59 BogoMips).
> Warning : It's hard to remain at the trailing edge of technology.
>
>
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--
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