In <listserv%[email protected]>, on 12/08/2008
at 09:14 AM, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> said:
>It depends on who has the more expensive lawyers. I once looked up (with
>some assistance) the notorious IBM 3270 TAB key patent. It appears that
>IBM periodically repatents it, always claming some new feature. These
>appear to me to be only paraphrases of the original claim.
My guess is that it's a defensive patent; not so much an abuse of the
patent system as a defense against that abuse and against incompetent or
lazy patent examiner. For IBM it's a win-win situation; if the USPTO
rejects the patent as obvious to a practitioner or as prior art then they
can't issue the patent to someone else.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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