When it comes to patents, there is less than meets the eye. A review of Intellectual Property in New Zealand a few years ago found that the NZ Intellectual Property Office quite deliberately do not review patent applications for originality. An IP law expert I spoke to about this felt that there was no problem, because patents that failed the originality criterion would fail in court. It didn't seem to bother him that defending yourself costs money. He was also untroubled that computer science professionals find most software patents incomprehensible; again, such patents fail a basic requirement so it should all be cleared up in court (and of course we can all afford that).
The Australians recently conducted an experiment asking volunteers to check for prior art. The patent application I commented on claimed the invention of doing whole number arithmetic in a computer using "big digits" to base (10**max) where (10**max) just fits into a computer word. This of course goes back to _at least_ the 1960s. The people who claimed this particular patent may well have perfectly innocent intentions: they may not be trying to block anyone else doing obvious things, they may be trying to protect themselves against being blocked. The only way to tell, really, is to find out what they want for a licence to use "their" "invention". The current review of New Zealand IP protection may well scrap software patents entirely, in part on the grounds that we cannot afford to do a proper job of scrutiny. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe