
A Patent Lie - New York Times - brett
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/opinion/09lee.html?ex=1339041600&en=a2f3d8f1f3cfcb61&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
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tx
I disagree. People who write about patents in software industry often fall
into habit of calling everything a software. While in reality software is just
a language to describe a computational formula (algorithm).

I can easily see someone taking years of their time and personal money
invested into (for instance) image recognition research and comimng up with a
truly remarkable alrotithms capable (dreaming here) of automaticaly driving
cars or instantly recogizing a criminal's face looking over thousands of
people enter an airport terminal.

And I can see some other company either reverse-engineering the code or just
looking into it (if it's open source) or hiring a couple of your engineers and
doing _exact_ same thing without spending a dime on research.

In fact, this happens all the time with universities. They get grants and
other kinds of money to conduct research only to see their professors and grad
students leaving and doing the same thing on their own.

But frankly, I can't suggest anything. Patents shall not be granted for
obvious things, but defining "obvious" will not be easy.

I am guilty myself, the company I used to work for filed for two patents with
my name on them. While in reality they were trivial (obvious) applications of
XML to UI builders. Patent lawyers felt otherwise though.

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hello_moto
Defense is the best attack.

