[cc-licenses] Copyright of XML schema instantiation
J.B. Nicholson-Owens
jbn at forestfield.org
Sun Aug 27 04:03:36 EDT 2006
drew Roberts wrote:
> I hear that in fact this is more that they should not be able to patent your
> ideas after you have published them, not that they cannot, and that in fact,
> the searches done for prior art are way too small and patents are awarded
> like this fairly regularly. AND... the costs to invalidate the patent are way
> too large and the process too long.
>
> Anyone with facts care to comment?
According to the Free Software Foundation, the USPTO issued patents to both
IBM and Unisys which covered the same algorithm--the LZW algorithm. This is
part of the basis for why there were (perhaps still are) no GIF files used in
the GNU Project website:
From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
> Even if Unisys really did give permission for free software to generate
> GIFs, we would still have to deal with the IBM patent. Both the IBM and
> the Unisys patents cover the same "invention"--the LZW compression
> algorithm. (This could reflect an error on the part of the US Patent and
> Trademark Office, which is famous for incompetence and poor judgment.)
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