Regarding contacting the patent office about a not-yet-issued
patent, you can also contact the inventors and/or their attorneys
directly, as they have a legal obligation to keep the patent office
informed of relevant prior art which has come to their attention:http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/matters/matters-9707.html You can grab the name and phone-# of the contact person at Micrsoft's "Patent Group Docketing Dept." from the 28 Feb 2007 Declaration document at the PAIR website that Wes mentioned in his post. In my experience, large companies have a strong financial interest to stop pursuing worthless patent applications as quickly as possible. That is, while they can always ammend their claims with new restrictions until *something* issues, that something might not be worth the effort. The budgetary pressures of Microsoft's "Patent Group" will work in your favor, in this case. Ironically ... one of the pieces of prior art cited against this Microsoft patent application is US patent #6,405,262, filed for in July of 1995. Patent assignee ... Microsoft. :} cheers, Scott On Aug 11, 2009, at 2:55 PM, Wes Felter wrote: > David Barrett wrote: > >> It's patent #20080205288, named "Concurrent connection testing for >> computation of NAT timeout period". > > This is a patent application, not a patent. It is likely that it > will be > granted (since most applications are granted), but it hasn't been > granted yet, so I suppose you could contact the USPTO to object (I > don't > know the process for doing this). > > You can follow the history of this app in PAIR: > http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair > The current status appears to be that the USPTO issued a non-final > rejection of all the claims, however it is normal for the author to > revise the claims until they are acceptable. > > Wes Felter _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
