Slashdot Mirror
Linked List Patented in 2006
An anonymous reader writes "Congratulations are in order to Ming-Jen Wang of LSI Logic Corporation who, in patent #10260471 managed to invent the linked list. From the abstract, "A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for various purposes." Good-bye doubly linked list. We should also give praise to the extensive patent review performed by Cochran Freund & Young LLP."
I would show the prior art, but I can't read the reel-to-reel tapes.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
People are immediatly shouting "prior art!" I don't care about prior art as much as I care about the fact that it's another software patent and unworthy of being patented.
I read the claims... somebody submit a patent for insertion and deletion operations.
The US patent office has proved its incompetence in this area time and time again.
If you must have software patents, why not a specialist software patent office to deal with them?
If you RTFP, what's actually being patented is the idea of using multiple pointers so that the same item can be in more than one linked list at a time. This idea is also a long way from being novel, but it's slightly different from patenting the linked list. Arguably a doubly-linked list is prior art...
Xenu loves you!
thats not a reference, thats a pointer!!
;)
*smack*
Go back to Algorithms and Data Structures, Do not pass go, Do no increment the Counter by 200
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
I read about this technique about 23 years ago. What is going on here? This looks like material for a slashdot poll, viz:-
Why do you think that the latest LSI is bogus?
What about it, guys?
--E.
I've got so much code modifying to do.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
To be fair ... the first patent that the examiner cited is PRIOR ART (I'd argue it too is invalid) for this patent.
What's worse? LibTomCrypt uses quad-lists (prev/next, parent/child) so it seems that I violate this patent. Gotta go cut a cheque to LSI.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The patent # is actually 7028023. The summary quoted number is the application number. Also, this is OLD, issued almost a full year ago. I actually think we had an argument about this long before now. I am starting to wonder if some of these anonymous submissions for these are actually coming from examiners with a clue. (Trust me there are some.) And look, I found it.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
The same patent was mentioned in this Slashdot article. What is new since then?
You are all suffering from hindsight bias, you all think you've used linked and double links and n-linked lists before but in reality you were using vectors and this is a genuine innovation. ;)
c tions_Rapporteur_fails_to_protect_European_industr y
Here in the EU, JURI is trying to criminalize all IP infringements again:
http://press.ffii.org/Press_releases/Criminal_San
The vote is expected 20th March (tomorrow) with the aim of making minor copyright, trademark and patent infringement into a criminal offense. There is no fair use in Europe either.
This has little to do with the real world, EU has no jurisdiction in European criminal law, but if it can make a trade issue into a criminal law issue it can expand EU control in that direction. So JURI has cooked up this trick whereby IP rights are claimed as a trade issue and pumped it up to claim infringement needs criminal prosecutions.
Patenting y=mx+b as a method of drawing a line is wrong. Patenting a device that uses this to draw a line, that is different. Algorithms that describe basic ways of doing things are not novel. The biggest difference though is that with a device, if someone discovers some neat effect they can patent a certain way of doing it, but others can come an innovate on that device, inventing something that has the same effect but does it differently and is therefore not covered under the original patent. In software they are patenting the effect, here we have a mutli-way linked linked list, something that CS students have to do in freshman level classes. But now, we can't use it in any way without having to worry about defending ourselves. As someone who writes software for a living I would rather give up on ever getting a patent than having to worry for the rest of my life about implementing something someone else came up with and patented.
The there is the issue that computer science moves along at such a clip that one company having a monopoly on an idea for the standard patent term could seriously stifle innovation in the field, which is directly against what the entire point of patents are.
You've still got it wrong. It's an abstracted class.
You cannot dereference the pointer; that's impossible. You must first realize that there is no pointer, and that you're only dereferencing yourself.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Texture mapping.
How about slocate?
Or rsync?
Oh and data muxing.
Fantastic!
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I was an examiner for awhile. Got out after 9 months because I saw the path. A lot of $, but a lot of OCD people, and stress due to quotas.
I had a B.S. in C.S. and I was simply working on GUI patent apps. They wouldn't hire someone with a degree in an outside area (like Business or something) to do C.S. work, although there were a lot of EE's doing C.S. work (although I see that in the commercial realm a lot too, not always to great success, but sometimes).
Wouldn't recommend it for anyone other than an anti-social who wants to make bank and doesn't mind a boring, high-stress job.
Now the more likely scenario is that the drug companies are mainly working on chemical solutions to psychological conditions like depression which were often previously treated with counselling. Those 100 million dollar drugs aren't curing anything, they're alleviating symptoms marginally better than the previous patent-protected drug did.
Finding compounds that are potentially active against some disease, especially compounds with relatively new mechanisms of action, is considered "basic research" - academia does a good job in this area, because it makes for good papers, PhD dissertations and academic plaudits.
Taking those compounds and ensuring they are safe to administer in humans (rather than just animal models), and that they are as efficacious or more efficacious than other existing treatments is a costly, time-consuming process that requires managing a huge staff, coordinating clinics and hospitals, managing information systems, etc. This is not something universities or most research labs are set up to do properly.
If you eliminated patents, you clearly wouldn't stop the scientists, but you'd put a huge damper on industry and financiers wanting to back the latter part of this process. This would result in far fewer drugs getting through the FDA approval process.
It may be the case that there is a more societally efficient way to do this than the current system, but I'm not sure what it is. One problem with the current system is that one effect of it is that the US effectively subsidizes other countries drug availability, because drug companies expect to earn a large portion of their profits here, and have to deal with centrally negotiated pricing and other issues in foreign markets. But I don't see how you'd think that eliminating patents entirely would help the situation.
make cast? I've done make, make install, make clean, make menuconfig, make xconfig, make modules make modules install, but I've never done make cast...
But obviously I've never compiled anything with a linked list in it anyhow, since this dude just barely invented them.
My regime would require this for patents that are blatantly obvious or have as much published prior art as linked lists do. You can be there'd be a lot fewer frivolous patents issued if the examiner and the applicant were forced to eat the printouts if the patent turned out to be retarded.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
One last follow-up that I realized I forgot to discuss:
In submitting your pre-September 26, 2002 "prior art," you should also make sure that the "prior art" is at least "prior art" under 35 U.S.C. Section 102(b). For the unfamiliar, this is "102(b)" prior art. "Prior art" that falls under the rubric of 35 U.S.C. Section 102(b) generally cannot be challenged by the Applicant of the application for patent. For example, with "102(a)" prior art, the Applicant for patent can "swear behind" the prior art to show that the the Applicant's "date of invention" is before the "prior art's" earliest effective date.
As an example, I note that the filing date of application is September 26, 2002. In this example, if you were to submit "102(a)" prior art with an earliest effective date of September 27, 2001, the Applicant of the patent may be able to demonstrate that he/she was working on the invention as of September 20, 2001, hence, overcoming the application of this art (there are some legal concerns regarding what constitutes "working on," but I'll save that discussion for a later time). Now, suppose you submit "prior art" with an earliest effective date of September 25, 2001. This is "102(b) prior art" because it's earliest effective date is at least one year prior to the earliest effective filing date of the application (there are some issues when the application claims priority to an earlier filed application, but this is not the case). In this scenario, where the "prior art" applied is "102(b) prior art," the Applicant cannot swear behind the applied "prior art," even if the Applicant was working on the invention before the earliest effective date of the "102(b) prior art."
That being said, you should also consider whether your "102(b) prior art" discloses each and every limitation of all of the claims, not simply the independent claims (in this case claims 1, 3 and 4.) (For a discussion of "what is a limitation," see the various sub-sections of Section 608.01 of the MPEP. However, I will note that you can combine references under 35 U.S.C. 103, but again, that's a discussion for another topic.
So, to recap:
1) Make sure that your reference is before the earliest, effective filing date of the application for patent (i.e. that it is "prior art");
2) Make sure that your "prior art" is "102(b) prior art"; and,
3) Make sure that each and every limitation of each and every claim is disclosed in the application.
These views represent my own and are in no way associated with any government organization or private entity.