On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Wayde Milas wrote: > The whole point is, I'm pretty sure that the above patents would never > stand up. There is a multitude of works both in use today, and in > written papers/code using arithmetic encoding. Not only that, I dont > think any prior art search was done from 1976 to 1990 when the patents > were awarded. There is alot of prior art.
This is pretty typical in the software industry. The U.S. Patent Office has for a long time been granting patents for which there seem to be obvious prior art. (At one point, a company practically claimed they'd patented the hyperlink, and thus everybody who made a web page owed them royalties!) The problem is, a good number of these patents are in the hands of businesses whose business model and sole revenue source is to licence these patents. That makes them extremely disinclined to back down on them, and OSS projects (and a lot of commercial projects, for that matter) don't have the financial resources to fight the legal battle that would be needed to get the patent overturned. cjs -- Curt Sampson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ Flac-dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flac-dev
