On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:02:10 -0700
"Lawrence Rosen" <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
Eric Burger wrote:
I specifically applied for patents underlying the technology behind
RFC 4722/RFC 5022 and RFC 4730 specifically to prevent third
parties, who are not part of the IETF process, from extracting
royalties from someone who implements MSCML or KPML.
That was a waste of your time and money. Publication of those
inventions by you, at zero cost to you and others, would have been
sufficient to prevent someone else from trying to patent them. Next
time, get good advice from a patent lawyer on how to achieve your
goals without paying for a patent.
You're obviously right in theory on this point. I wonder whether
you're right in practice. We've all seen far too many really bad
patents issued, ones where prior art is legion. The (U.S.) patent
office seems to do a far better job of searching its own databases than
it does the technical literature.
I know there are many philosophical reasons why many people oppose
software patents. But for others, there are very practical reasons:
there are too many bad patents issued. I think we can all agree that
stopping bad patents is a worthwhile goal, even if for some it's just
an intermediate goal.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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