Terry Harris wrote:

> The side effect of making more money for the holder of patents
> for invention which wasn't

I agree completely on this one (even if I did alter the context). Some countries have provisional patents for a period when prior art claims can be made before the permanent patent is issued.

Let me give one example (out of many) of a particularly bad patent that was issued that affects some embedded systems.  US Patent 6233595 (issued in 2001) Fast multiplication of floating point values and integer powers of two. It covers the very narrow
case of multiplying a floating point number by an integer which is a power of two. Floating point numbers are defined as ssssssssss * 2 ^eee if you multiply this by 4 for example the result will be ssssssssss * 2 ^(eee+2). The claims (all 16) are based
around the significant not being altered in the process and only integer math is needed on the exponent. The case of multiplying a float by 4.0 is not claimed although it has the same solution.

It took about 20 key strokes in Google to find prior art.

The good news is in the automotive industry a 100 years ago faced the same problem, everyone was patenting the obvious and trivial solutions. The problem became self correcting. All these patents timed out and we can have brake gas and clutch pedals in
the same order on all cars.

The failure a real process for software patents has had an unintended consequence. Software companies adopted the model of a publishing houses and copyrighted their works. There are two unintended consequences. The protection lasts much longer than a
patent. Patents offer protection in exchange for full disclosure. This is to assure at some future point the patent will be fully available in the public domain. Copyrights have both teeth and don't require full disclosure.

Regards,

--
Walter Banks
Byte Craft Limited
http://www.bytecraft.com







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