Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Altnet Threatens P2P Companies Over File Hash Patents

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the knuth-cited dept.

devil_doll writes "I saw over on p2pnet that Altnet is trying to 'mug' a number of P2P companies with seemingly bogus patents. One of them is titled 'Data processing system using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items have the same identifiers,' and appears to be nothing more than a simple hash table."

1 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good patents by mumblestheclown · · Score: 0, Redundant
    Yet again, listen CLOSELY.

    there are a lot of BAD software patents out there. Your naming one or two of them (hypothetical ones, in this case) and then asking me to argue against them only indicates that you have not actually read what I have to say.

    What I have been saying in my posts is threefold:

    • there are a lot of bad software patents out there
    • however, the idea of software patents is fundamentally sound. it is the IMPLEMENTATION that needs to be cleaned up.
    • that said, the implementation is not easy to do... though it is doable.
    With regard to your idea that patented software be OSd after the patent expires: YOU MISS THE POINT ENTIRELY: the CODE is COPYRIGHTED. The IDEA is patented. Your idea to open source the code is IRRELEVANT. Learn the difference between copyright and patent, for god's sake.