>    I understand your point, but as I'm sure you know, invention is
>    an incremental process... Most patents advance the state of the
>    art by just a small amount; there are very few gigantic leaps.
>
>    New inventions generally build on existing ones, and there's
>    nothing wrong with granting patents to those new inventions. 
.. even if the new 'invention' is an obvious application of existing,
well-known technology (i.e. shift registers) that ANY engineer would
have come up with faced with the same requirement ? 
It seems wrong to be able to patent the application of well known
techniques in an obvious way to solve a problem that has cropped up,
which is only novel in that the *problem* has not cropped up before,
not that a novel, non-obvious  solution to a problem has been
invented.   If you built a cpu with a 13 bit core, could you patent a
13 bit shift register, as this is presumably outside the scope of MCTs
patent ?
The claims relating to eprom cells seem like sloppy patent writing -
this should have really been more general, e.g. 'nonvolatile memory
cells' would have covered eprom, eeprom, flash and fuses! 

     ____                                                           ____
   _/ L_/  Mike Harrison / White Wing Logic / wwl@netcomuk.co.uk  _/ L_/
 _/ W_/  Hardware & Software design / PCB Design / Consultancy  _/ W_/
/_W_/  Industrial / Computer Peripherals / Hazardous Area      /_W_/