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Re: Patents: fees, validity, and disclosure process.
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 1994 16:56:08 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Everett F Batey says:
> Does the patent claimant also claim that all similar key exchanging
> systems which predominated in military hardware in the last 50 years
> are the intellectual property of the claimant ???
IBM has also recently successfully patented finite state machines.
Is it too late for me to attempt to patent the use of bit strings to
encode letters of alphabet and other symbols for transmission over
data networks incorporating retransmission of corrupted packets?
Why not? Everyone should play the patent lottery, and see if they can
win! The chances may be better than Publisher's Clearinghouse, and the
payoff might even be better. :-)
Seriously, perhaps we should take this discussion off-line. I suspect
most everyone agrees that overly broad patents are a bad thing, just as
export controls on cryptography are a bad thing. Unfortunately, it's a
fact of life, at least in the United States, and so we're going to have
to live with it. (Or at least those things we can do, like lobby
Congress, *really* fall outside the scope of this these working group
lists.)
If there are specific patent issues that are particular to either the
ipsec working group, or the mobile-ip working group, we should discuss
them in our respective WG mailing lists. But this public hand-wringing
about how the PTO is destroying western civilization by granting vague,
over-broad patents which have decades of prior art is only going to be
preaching to the choir. People who really care about these issues
should be sending these flame-o-grams^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
expressions of concern to their congressmen.
- Ted
References: