--- "YKY (Yan King Yin)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The point of patents is to reward the person to *first* invent something.
It would be nice if the patent system rewarded innovation, but it doesn't. In my work in data compression I deal with this all the time. Patents discourage innovation and progress. If you come up with an innovative new algorithm, how do you know that you are not infringing on somebody's patent? Are you going to go through all 2-3 million of them that haven't expired, or even the hundreds of thousands dealing with computers? Have you even read one patent and tried to figure out what is claimed? Even the USPTO can't do it. For example, they granted two separate patents on the LZW compression algorithm (used in GIF images) to both IBM and Unisys, not realizing that both companies were patenting the same invention. Here is another example. Because of patents, JPEG files are about 10% larger now than they would be otherwise. The standard covers a variety of coding techniques, including both Huffman coding, which is not patented, and arithmetic coding, which compresses smaller, but was covered at the time by several patents (some now expired, some not). As a result, the arithmetic coding part of the standard was never implemented. The bzip2 data compressor was downgraded for the same reason. When the JPEG standard was written in 1991, the spec listed all patents known at the time, but how do you know? In 2004, Forgent sued 31 large companies for infringing on their patent which covered the "invention" of assigning a code to represent a run of zeros followed by a nonzero value. After a long court battle the USPTO eventually ruled there was prior art and invalidated the relevant parts of the patent. But if you are a small company, can you afford to do this? If you think you can read a patent and figure out if you are infringing, good luck. Only a judge can decide this, and the decision will probably be based on which of two technical experts he thinks is lying. Patents are good for lawyers. It is the reason we have big companies like MPEG-LA just to manage licensing for the 600 or so patents covering MPEG video. My PAQ data compressor uses arithmetic coding, and maybe some other methods that may or may not be covered by patents. If I wasn't giving it away, I might care about this. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
