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JPEG Committee On The Ball, Seeks Prior Art
Sangui5 writes: "It seems as if the JPEG Committee has noticed the recent patent fuss, and is working on the prior art angle. Good to know that even though there's a new standard, the committee is standing by their previous work."
The idea is just silly. Makes me want to go patent the Redbook standard and sue the RIAA.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
How will this affect the new Jpeg 2000?
What was your username again? -BOFH
According to the article, JPEG 2000 has had extensive work done to obtain royalty-free licensing. In general, it is thus implied that the JPEG committee believes JPEG 2000 to be unaffected by the patent claims which allegedly restrict the existing JPEG standard.
So how will this impact the whole GIF vs. PNG thing?
Learn it. Know it. Be it.
Ahh, time to bust out with my prOn collection. As every /. reader knows the prOn industry has been at the bleeding edge of technology. :)
Im sure some one has an image that can show prior art.
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
...how about the people that actually developed the JPEG format?? Shouldn't the patent then be credited (ie, transferred) to [that person|those people]?
"We wanted to ensure the investment community and the general public are clear about the terms of our valuable JPEG data compression technology, one of the many technologies we have in our patent portfolio," stated Richard Snyder, chairman and chief executive officer at Forgent. "We are in ongoing discussions with other manufacturers of digital still cameras, printers, scanners and other products that use JPEG technology for licensing opportunities."
I'm not sure I'd even praise the JPEG group for taking swift action - I'd say they're doing what's necessary to combat Forgent's crime. Doing their job as a standards body like an officer does his job as a member of the police. Read that press release again, and try not to grit your teeth.
If you want my opinion (and I'm sure you don't), a company whose business plan involves sitting on a patent for eleven years, then springing back to life to collect, doesn't just need to be stopped. They need to be prosecuted - for a calculated conspiracy to defraud the general public and standards bodies.
... the Porn Industry is expected to hit a recession... heh :)
"Derp de derp."
could save tens of thousands of bytes by using
</unndeedsarcasmdisclaimer>
secondhand sigs do not bring secondhand coolness (apologies to the onion)
The JPEG Committee had to do this. So what if there is a new standard? Without securing the old one, who would adopt the new one.
They could say two things:
1) We've got a new standard. Just move every image on the web to it.
2) This is absurd. We're going to fight this, but if all else fails, slowly adapt the new standard.
At least now, with option number two, they maintain credibility, as they don't have unreasonable expectations.
Also, a bit off-topic, but is there any real competition for a web photo-quality image format? PNG is an obvious GIF killer and is slightly entrenched (IE, has browser support), but JPEG2000 isn't as far as I know.
Their patent describes a technique for digital video compression that uses some of the same mathematical techniques as JPEG, only their method requires more than one frame to be present to offer any significant compression (so I have been told).
If that is true, that alone should be enough to tell Forgent to piss off.
IANAL
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I know that in trademark law, if a company fails to vigorously enforce a trademark they lose claim to it. The effect of this is McDonald's sometimes sues a little family restarant called McDonald's and other strange insane lawsuits.
Does this same thing not apply to patent law at all? A company has a patent, allows it to be deluted, and then goes after everybody. In trademark law, this would be thrown out of court.
Now you could say "Trademarks and Patents are two different things" but they are really aren't. And so I'd like a laywer to explain to me WTF gives companies the right to broadside tech firms every few months with bullshit patent claims.
They're calling apon all the old skool pr0n collectors?
c0w goes moo.
So.. If they want prior art that pre-dates the patent in question, all we need to do is find, lurking in some deep and dark corner of the internet, some REALLY old JPEG compressed image, most likely pornography.
Course, to prove that this file really was old, we'd have to find the subject and maybe pose them the same way to show it's the same person, and then.. uhh.. no, wait.. old person porn.. Eww!
Please disregard!
*opens wallet, prepares to just pay the stupid royalties*
-Matt
Crazy
Thank God for the JPEG group. Couldnt have made http://goatse.cx without em! God bless!
The irony in this is that standards bodies are part of the Great Word Capitalism, which is the same general philosophy/entity that created frivolous lawsuits and absurd patents. At least the first group Forget (intentionally misspelled) contacted wasn't the developers of The Gimp or something.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Didn't Rambus get slapped for this sort of trick? If I remember correctly, they held certain IP which they did not disclose during the standards meetings. Then they waited until lots of other companies were using those standards, which incorporated their IP. When the momentum was already strong, they attempted to collect absurd royalties, and let loose their legal dogs to pounce on anyone who didn't ante up. Sounds verrrrrryyyyyy familiar.
I'm not sure I'd even praise the JPEG group for taking swift action - I'd say they're doing what's necessary to combat Forgent's crime. Doing their job as a standards body like an officer does his job as a member of the police.
The thing to understand here is that the way things are lately, we consider it an unusual and joyous occation when a computer industry body does its job properly or acts in the public interest..
1) Patent 4,698,672 can be searched for at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm. The URL is too long to paste here.
2) The jpeg.org page seems to indicate that the patent only affects the baseline implementation of JPEG. If this is true, then it should be possible to write a new baseline implementation that doesn't infringe on the patent.
3) I'm curious what prior art will show up. In 1986, many people were still using BSAVE/BLOAD to store images.
If the patent was filed in 1986, then it will expire in 2003, 17 years later. Please remember that the underlying problem with patents is bad legislation.
Got friends?
I'm sure there's some on my page... Just try, Forge-it, just try.
This sig no verb.
... at least we know that bevels are safe.
Drop shadows too!
--- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? | Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
It seems to me that a patent that has been released into the public domain (at least for non-commercial use) should remain so if and when the patent is sold. I don't believe that there is any law requiring this, but anyone selling an 'open patent' should include a requirement that it remain open as terms of the sale to avoid this very situation.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone should decide to challenge a patent that was open only to be closed at a later date. Think about the series of events: Group A invents an image compression algorithm and grants me license to use the patent free of charge. I develop a group of products based on this agreement. Everything is cool until Group B buys the patent and says I can't use the patent anymore (or worse, demands back royalties). But wait, my products were based on a agreement I had with Group A, not Group B. Group B came in after the original agreement and is trying to change the terms of my agreement with Group A after I've executed the agreement. I would argue that Group B would be compelled to honor any agreements that Group A had in force at the time of the purchase as part of the package of buying the patent.
===
All your patents are belong to us.
When all else fails, run.
To see why, consider the standard process for creating a patent in a large company:
- You write up an overview of the patent, and submit it. Presumably you know your field, so the first 'prior art filter' is you - have you heard of anything similar?
- You hand it over to your companies patent agent. (S)he will probably be assigned to a particular field (e.g. 'audio/video/image processing'), so understands the area, but is not going to be an expert.
- The patent agent reads through your explanation and does a prior art search - and returns to you a selection of things that may be relevant.
- You explain how your invention is novel compared to these. If you convince him, then the wheels are set in motion, and your company (eventually) submits a patent application.
- The Patent Office reads it and searches for prior art. If they find none, your patent is granted, while if they find something, then it is up to you/your company to dispute their findings.
So, in steps 3 & 5 you have legal experts who understand the area, but are probably not technically expert in the exact field of the patent who have a responsibility to search for prior art. They are also under time pressure, as they have loads of proposals to deal with. So what they do is pull out a few relevant keywords from the proposal and search on them in some prior-art database.The most obvious (and easy) database is the existing patents DB. Now, I'm sure they have other databases they use, but whenever I've been through the process, nearly all the potential prior art which has been returned to me via the patent agent has been previously published patents. So if an idea hasn't been patented before, then it's got a good chance of getting accepted as a new patent.
So if the JPEG group build an extensive, easily searchable catalogue of prior art (with times, keywords, etc.), then it will make the patent agents life a lot easier, thus increasing the quality of patents.
Been around since 1985. Hopefully they would still have something lying around...
Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
Computers are not magical beings, capable of exercising judgement.
The problem is that the default for patent applications, since the PTO reform of several years ago, is "granted".
It should be *harder*, not easier, to prove lack of prior art. The failure of a database query hardly constitutes "lack of prior art". It also does noting with regard to the uniqueness or obviousness provisions.
Your suggested database would result in *more*, not *fewer* bogus patents being granted, because it would accelerate the application process without adding any protection above and beyond what's already there.
-- Terry
What patent dispute?
So I visited www.jpeg.org
As an official site of one of very popular graphic format, I found it's very crappy looking
Well, I shouldn't judge the web site by its look, but someone has to clean up that cheesy look.
Although it does smell a bit like Rambus, the situations aren't really similar at all.
The big difference here is that Rambus was a member of the standards body in question (JEDEC). The agreement they signed to become a member of this standards body obligated them to disclose patents. They didn't and thus violated a contract.
As far as I can tell, Forgent is not a member of the JPEG organization, nor did they ever propose to the JPEG body that they adopt their IP as a standard.
The two situations may look similar on the surface, but that is where the similarities end.
I tried a few searches, "jpeg 2000 (license/patent/open source)", but
I didn't find anything. Any tips?
How will a database fix things?
Even if it's "the bestest database ever", it still has to be searched by humans with a sufficient understanding of the practice of the art to select appropriate search terms, by way of a common lexicography with the filing mechanism which was used to load the "magic database".
In other words, why is the problem ammenable to a fractional technical answer, in your opinion?
I really don't understand what a database will do, other than identify what has or has not been patented previously -- and therefore, it will not contain anything which would otherwise fail the obviousness test, since such things are not patentable.
Also, FWIW: In the U.S., they are called "patent examiners", not "agents", and the filer bears the brunt of the search for prior art, in a seperate process called a "patent search". It's not up to individual examiners to prove that something was not patented previously.
The only thing your database does is make it easier to file patents by making it easier for the non-patent-office-personnel to do their searches.
In other words, the suggested database does not address any of the process issues that are the root of the problem in the first place.
If you want to dicuss fixes... fine. But creation of a database is not a fix, it's just a means of exacerbating the problem.
-- Terry
There is nothing unclear about the situation you describe; if rights to a patent are sold, this includes all obligations to previous license agreements.
"a company whose business plan involves sitting on a patent for eleven years, then springing back to life to collect, doesn't just need to be stopped. They need to be prosecuted"
I agree. If it's not illegal yet, it should be. It doesn't even matter whether or not this particular patent is applicable to JPEG, this is yet another case of abuse of the patent law to do things that the law was not intended for. A big part of the problem is that fighting this nonsense required ridiculous amounts of time and money, making it really effective for the "plaintiff" even if they are not holding a valid and applicable patent. And that is just sad.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I used to write software for a very large corporation. We were frequently encouraged to file patents for anything that we invented. We were rewarded even if our patent application was rejected. A successful patent application was a big deal. The corporation was quite sensibly trying to build up its portfolio of patents.
Eventually, you may have to work for some big corporation to write software. Only someone with a big software patent portfolio will be in a position to cross license with the other big players and thereby receive legal permission to use a basic set of key patents. I expressed this concern to a lawyer at Unisys, and his response was basically 'So what?'. He said that he thought that this had already happened in the chemical industry.
I guess that I was something of a crackpot to voice these views inside the big corporation where I worked. It was very encouraging to find out that the folks at the League for Programming Freedom(http://lpf.ai.mit.edu) share my reservations about software patents.
They did this to personally slight you. Ignore that there are several different people working on a backend where (litterally) thousands of stories are entered by hopeful posters every day. The major first step in this is the quick scan of titles, where they just tick off any titles which seem like confused or bad posts. Then they have to sivv through all the remaining ones, edit (which they don't really do well here at /.), and post. They do this all day, most days. But ignore that and assume they did it just because they don't like you.
Now come back to reality. They do not have a personal "out to get warpedrive" cabal meeting every week, nor did they reject your story because of any reason other than they just rejected it. Things which are bad in the world happen because they do, not because someone or something is out to get you. HTH. HAND.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If you read through the patent claim forgent has you can see it is RLE encoding based on LZW and not approximation like JPEG has. Forgents patent is non lossy where JPEG is, actually it has more claim to PNG than JPEG in that case. Which is not very good either if you ask me. I also had a look through the database at the patent office and there are hundreds of similar claims to all kinds of compression algorithms. Some are so fuzzy you could applicate them to anything. Somehow I feel this is only the beginning. The patents really needs a change in the laws in order to clarify the patents and get rid of these ambushes. Fortunately in EU you don't have to care about patents as long as it is for free use.
The problem is that Compression Labs (owned by Forgent) were *part* of the JPEG standards committee! They took the ideas they *heard* there and patented them without telling people! When they were found out, they were kicked out of the committee! They've already lost one of their (much more effective for extortion) JPEG-stealing patents because it's expired now.
I was a little wary of what was posted at the DJVuLibre (a free wavelet compression implementation). They claimed that they were given a free license to ATT's wavelet stuff, and I was a little paranoid. Because I didn't know if "broad rights" meant as much freedom as people are used to with GPLed software.
I agree .. throw the bastards in jail.
Also, Sony and the JPEG community should sue them for fraudulent collection of royalties.
Please encourage the jpeg comittee to do so.
Send them a email.
As the Forgent mess shows...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
And yes, I still use EA-IFF 85 to encode my files, curse XML and its hatred of binary data.
I note that Microsoft ripped off that format and uses it (with modifications of course - changed the endianness and alignment of chunks) for WAV files.
Hire Google to overhaul the USPTO prior art database.
Would a "Prior Art" angle work for OpenGL? As most of you probably know Microsoft is claiming IP rights over parts of OpenGL. You just know that when the time is right they'll try to use any rights that they have to hurt Linux. The time will probably come when the gaming industries decides that Linux is a viable market.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
> Hire Google to overhaul the USPTO prior art database.
Or, hire Microsoft to wreck^H^H^H^H^H maintain the entire USPTO database.
Forgent = Forge NT
Forge NT = Forge New Technology
Forge New Technology = Underhanded Patent Revenue
Perhaps a closer analogy is Unisys. For many years, GIF files were the thing to use. They were popular on Compuserve, then on local BBSes, and along with JPEG, became the image file format of choice on the web. After all of that, Unisys decided to take advantage over their LZW patent, and require a small royalty for any applications that used GIFs.
It wasn't too much later that slashdot came around and posted a link to http://burnallgifs.org/. I wonder how long it will be until they post a link to http://burnalljpegs.org/.
Does this mean that Phillips may stop trying to coerce the RIAA into maintaining the CD standard when their patent runs out? If Phillips no longer holds a patent, what (monetary) incentive do they have in trying to force record companies to adhere to the CD standard instead of corrupting it with their wacky, hopeless "protection" schemes?
Transcript show: self sigs atRandom.
We are talking about the far-distant future after all*, and long before then middleware graphics engines will be powerful enough (and ubiquitous enough, due to economic forces) for shovelware to work on Linux. The middleware could be retargeted onto something less patent-encumbered.
* When programmers learn how to create decent user interfaces, hardware manufacturers give their specs out with joy, linux users get jobs and can afford to buy software and games companies feel like doing something they haven't done to death already. Yup, far distant future.
I'd scorch the heiney of the moron who allowed this drivel so totally that the closest he'd get to papents again is shining shoes.
I think that the patent office should go back to being a not-for-profit organization or government departement, ASAP.
This was a STUPID idea from the get go.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Patents on method in software is just plain stupid.
Often it is just a matter of putting stuff together.
All combinations do not have prior art. But there is often nothing special with it.
Oh no! They've been shanghai'd!
(incoming rotten tomatoes in 3... 2... 1...)
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
Actually, there is a principle similar to that which you describe. Go Googling for 'laches' or 'law of laches' and you'll find the relevant material.
If a patent holder is aware of infringing activity and doesn't do anything about it for a period of time (six years in the United States) then the infringer is not liable for damages.
However, unlike a trademark, a patent does not lapse without enforcement. As soon as the patent holder does get around to notifying the infringing party, then they can start claiming damages from that point on.
In other words, they can't sue every instance of 'infringement' that took place over the last fifteen years--they have forfeited that right. They may, however, demand royalties for further uses of JPEG compression. Assuming, of course, that their patent does cover the method in question, and that it holds up in court, and no prior art is found, and so forth...
IANAL, YMMV.
~Idarubicin
Seriously, the user community should hold off on trying to mass migrate from JPG until a)we have a viable alternative (is JPEG2000 ready for mass adoption?) b)Forgent actually wins a case against someone for violating this patent.
While I think patents on what amounts to math are ridiculous, I also think there needs to be some recognition that Forgent has forfeited its right to profit on this invention by waiting several years for the technology to spread into wide use. Forgent should have been filing C&Ds several years ago when JPGs were already all over Usenet (I remember seeing JPGs in 1995 at least). I realize this is patent and not trademark law, but had they tried to enforce these rights earlier probably an alternative to JPG would have been generated a lot sooner.
I do not have a signature
.. Because I submitted this story way earlier and this one gets accepted?
Assclowns.
* 2002-07-19 13:19:40 Video Conferencing Company to Persue Royalties on (articles,money) (rejected)
Oh wait, actually I see why now! It cut off my subject at "Royaltes on..." where I had JPEG. It showed up in the damn subject text box!
Assclowns! HEH.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
We'll let the representation stand for the deed here. :)
After all, puns that bad don't come along every day...
(I'm reminded of that sequence near the start of one of the Leisure Suit Larry games -- maybe II or III? Anyway, the one with the comic delivering loads of "Take my wife.... please!" jokes, each with the requisite crash of the high hat...)
deus does not exist but if he does
Some (at least one of which I was aware) of the RAMBUS agreements with Memory Makers were
set up to become null and void if the RAMBUS patent claims were ever successfully challenged
in court.
Perhaps some of the companies rolling over on the JPEG claims applied a similar loophole
in their agreements, hoping that a challenge to Forgent's patent claims would prove a
more viable approach than trying to defend thier own company in open court.
Unless you're into the really wacky stuff, are you sure that "bleeding edge" is the term you want to use here?
Just a thought.
> OpenGL/Microsloth patent dispute is the same deal
There is no dispute; Microsoft bought those patents from SGI.
A database might help solve some of the technical problems, but in the U.S., at least, the political problems would pose a significantly different challenge.
I'd venture that there are many, many individuals whose interests would not be served by improving the patent system. If I recall correctly, there was a previous post on a similar thread (months ago here on /.) asserting that the patent office was one of the few departments of government (in the U.S.) that regularly turns a profit.
--
The opinions expressed in this posting are my own and do not necessarily reflect the stance or opinions of my employer.
Given an alphabet 0, 1, 2, ... where p(0) > p(1) and p(1) >> p(2), p(3), ...
construct the following codepoints:
- (0*1) - i.e. zero or more zeroes followed by a one, including the one)
- (0*)[^01] - zero or more zeroes, followed by non-0 non-1, not including the non-zero-one)
- 2, 3,
... - each other symbol in the alphabet
Then code these symbols with a Huffman code.A search of deja in comp.dsp for 1990 on the subject "Still Monochrome Picture Coding Standards" shows some possible starting points for the techology that went into JPEG.
JPEG2000 will not succeed as a direct replacement for JPEG. It is a much more complicated standard that has significantly larger performance costs. JPEG2000 will find big wins where it has big benefits, namely in networked progressive rendering that scales by resolution/quality/spatial-location. As a "stand-alone finished file format" it does not provide enough benefits to replace JPEG. The biggest advantages of traditional JPEG is its relative simplicity and it ubiquity. Time and again the world relearns that the world will not beat a path to your door for a better mousetrap, it takes huge benefits to overcome Metcalf's Law (paraphrased as: the value of something scales geometrically with its ubiquity)
Weird - I was thinking the same thing...
I always thought NT was chosen because it was one letter off from MS (kinda like the HAL-IBM thing).
They probably meant Forget
Especially on the /. backend (obligitory shot of Timothy working on it), there's just a whole ton of shit flying through it a lot. People who have crackpot schemes or stuff which was posted before will litterally spam and spam and spam for days to get something posted. In the noise good stuff is lost, it happens.
What you need to do is just try again.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Or buffer overflows... or the easter egg [in software]...
Nothing like being able to sue a company for the bugs they include in their programs (and there are always some!). And I doubt anyone's thought to patent bugs just yet. "It's a whole new paradigm!"
On second thought, the really scary bit is that someone probably *has* thought of it.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
1. JPEG committee .org will be collecting pre-patent documents for invalidating this. Feed them prior art. IEEE, SPIE, etc. articles and actual pre-existing s/w and h/w products will be harder to find than patents and probably more useful.
2. If you want a standard unencumbered by patents, *use patents as the source material for your lossy and lossless encoding algorithms*. That is, find 17/20-year old *expired* patents and use exactly the techniques from the patents. Everything else will be subject to threat from contemporaneously or earlier filed patents.
Of course, all of this requires large stacks of money to go to court. This is yet another example of why allowing software patents was such a big mistake in the U.S.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I think there was an article (comment, really) a while back about someone who inserted a "bug" that would only appear with a precise set of commands or keystrokes.. something that wouldn't normally happen, but the error would indicate who the author was, so he could come back and say that he wrote it, assuming his company edited his name out and re-released it without his permission or something.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
LAWYERS
feed on
LAWYERS
feed on
LAWYERS
feed on
LAAAAAAW
I wonder who holds the patent on PI?
Internet Movie Project
Excellent. Still laughing. :)
Yup, this time you have gotten the German quite
right (at least, it is a comprehensible and fairly
correct mixture between English and German).
-mirabile
I think you missed the point. I know that SGI sold the patent to M$. The real question is whether M$ is obligated to honor the prior licensing agreement SGI had with the open source community. The same goes for the JPEG dispute.
When all else fails, run.
to the GIF licencing halaballoo! And you can THANK an Amiga Software company (Cloanto of Italy) for this! Their PersonalPaint package was the first app to use it. The "Amiga Forever" emulation package is their major product at the moment.
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
This is exactly the type of answer I was looking for.
Thank you, not only for the info, but for the peace of mind.
*beer*
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The problem with democracy is that people have to go out and vote again and again ;)
Some class of problems.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Once you've taken all of the colors out of the rainbow, you've got nothing left to lose.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Ah for the 1970's when you could spend your hard, ehm, allocated money printing 5 foot high line-printer images of Farrah Fawcet. Careful character choice and multi-strinking each line was used to create the illusion of grey-scale.
I guess you could think of it as half-tone the geek way.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
What they mean by prire art is a older paten that may cover the same thing or is/can be applyed to jpeg, Not your dirty old p0rn
Well, actually, they didn't sit on the patent for 11 years.
They bought the company that owned the patent. When they realized that they were the owners of the patent, they decided to enforce it. This is well within their rights.
I think they will find, however, that in their greed to cash in on the ubiquitous use of JPEGs in the internet universe, they never considered the PR nightmare they just released upon themselves. The ill will generated by this may do far more damage to Forgent than any profit that could have been had by their current actions.
In the end, the forces of Good win out anyway, and we will all greatly benefit by Forgents' actions. This will propel JPEG2000 into mainstream use far earlier than otherwise. JP2K is a better technology than JPEG, but it would have had a tough time replacing such an incumbent technology. (e.g. GIF vs. PNG)
Whew! This water sure is cold!
No, I'm saying when you're submitting a story, you're voting for it (in a way). In order to keep up with the rest of the noise, you have to keep voting for it. It's still one of the better systems available, although I do like K5's voting queue a little more :)
As for voting for people in office, maybe you shouldn't be trying to always read the negative into statements.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Must think before posting
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
You are right on the money, and should be mod'ed up.
Of course patent, and all IP laws need to be revised. They are starting to do exactly what they were intended to prevent...
What incentive do I as a creator, inventor, artist have to produce if doing so simply puts me at risk of being thown in jail and or financially ruined by someone with a previous vague patent, purchased at auction.
Well, when land ownership changes, and there is a public right of way (which is loosely what the standard brings to the party), the new owner cannot revoke the public right of way. Now, personally, I feel that information etc should not be treated the same way as physical property, but, if companies want to do that, then they should live by the existing rules.
If starting point is prior art, then any patent ever emmited can be discarded. There is a starting point to any new "invention"...
I'd rather be sailing...