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Re: [cc-licenses] Copyright of XML schema instantiation

From: "J.B. Nicholson-Owens" <jbn AT forestfield.org>
To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Copyright of XML schema instantiation
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:03:36 -0500

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.)

Re: [cc-licenses] Copyright of XML schema instantiation, J.B. Nicholson-Owens, 08/27/2006