Re: [Asrg] user-level blacklisting patented

[Jim Witte <jswitte at bloomington.in.us>]

On Mar 17, 2005, at 9:20 PM, Peter Kay wrote:
> If this was so "obvious", then how many products have been created that
> employ our claims? As of about a year ago, we couldn't find any.

  To reference a totally and completely un-related thing that has 
popped up (relatively) recently - how "obvious" was the idea of 
Thefacebook?  The idea of large databases of personal information has 
been around forever (AOL et al probably pretty much invented it), the 
idea of social network theory has been around for a while, and the idea 
of using such a web-database to analyze and use such a graph in various 
ways would be "obvious" to anyone who thought of it (I thought of using 
it somewhat like in Thefacebook does about 6 years ago).  So I'd say 
that the pieces of Thefacebook are basically "obvious".  So why didn't 
it exist until last year?  Who knows.  But just because putting 
together "obvious" pieces may not have happened yet, does that mean 
that putting them together is something "unobvious", worthy of being 
called real "innovation", and thus worthy of a patent?  That's a 
philosophical question more suited to the CNI-Copyright list I think..

Jim (back to lurk-dom..)


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