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On Wednesday 15 March 2006 9:08 am, Paul Sutton wrote: > This seems bad news, however it would be interesting how things can be > defended in court, does this mean that a simple painting program (e,g > paint) the patent is held by the first person who thought about putting > color on to a surface, or perhaps the person who thought of the paint > tray, or even the person who invented a filing cabinate, (computer > directory sturcture),. Poor example - you need the legalese (weasel words). Consider instead EP 0066674: "File processing method using expanding display windows for selected records and text fields" http://swpat.ffii.org/pikta/txt/ep/0066/674/index.html.gz This is actually what mutt does, or any DOS text game. But yes, this - in effect - patents the idea of putting text from a datastore (i.e. file) onto the screen in locations other than simply the next available line at the bottom. It is that simple (and thankfully now too old). > The more I think of this the more ridculous it seems. Welcome to the world of patents. :-( The real problem is not that these things are utterly ridiculous (they are), it's that they are legal, powerful and crippling instruments of oppression, censorship, elitism and monopolistic business practice. Patents are inherently flawed. We all accept that patents are acceptable for pharmaceuticals and power tools or even a shield around a nuclear reactor. The problem comes when you try to legalise the wording to allow all the patents we can suffer whilst preventing those that we cannot. A patent on a molecule (drugs) cannot be easily distinguished in law from a patent on a particular construct of silicon. (Many drugs (most?) consist of ions or salts that are not tightly bound to the "core" molecule, just formed into a pair by synthetic means.) From there, how can anyone say that allowing an electrical current to pass through the material makes the material unpatentable? Now move on to the next stage - if you modify the current to create transient or permanent changes in the structure, that also cannot make the material itself unpatentable. Therefore silicon chips become patentable. It's only a matter of debate then whether the FORM of that silicon represents a different invention. If it does, then that FORM can be replicated in software that creates the same changes in another piece of silicon. Hey presto, the software becomes part of the invention. :-( Aaron? Would you agree? > Surly nearly everything done on computers is just a re invention of what > was done without them before PRECISELY. Everything you can ever do with a computer is merely a reimplementation of whatever has already been done. Simply creating the computer in the first place creates prior art for every subsequent operation. Naturally, Nokia et al. will fight to their last cent to assert otherwise. It's all just reorganising zeroes and ones. > , e.g spreadsheet is a computer > implementation of a accounts book, so rather than being a new invention > it's just a new version of an old idea, e.g typewriter to computer > keyboard, things simple evolve. Exactly. Every programme depends on the prior work of others. This is why prior art is so frequently ignored in patent applications - because if the principle was applied rigorously, nothing that involves a silicon chip could ever be patented. Every action attributable to a chip is simply an electromagnetic effect on the semi-conductors in the transistors. 0 1 0 1. On/off On.off. Everything else is simply a superset of that one process. Every action attributable to a computer is simply a superset of the chip process. Whether it happens in hardware, software, EPROM or DRAM is inconsequential. It is a repetition of a known art - namely how to switch a transistor. All that changes are the patterns of switching and the speed of switching. If patterns can be patented, software is at risk. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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