about patents

[Peter]

On Sun, 16 Apr 2006, Peter wrote:

>
> On Sun, 16 Apr 2006, Daniel Armstrong wrote:
>
>> Speaking of patents... There is an article in today's New York Times
>> about how NTP  - in pursuit of their lawsuit against RIM - buried
>> information about a fellow named Geoff Goodfellow who had done earlier
>> work on wireless email. Man, what a bunch of bottomfeeders...
>> 
>> The article is here:
>> 
>> http://tinyurl.com/kxwdr
>> 
>> I'm curious, though, how RIM missed digging up this info themselves.
>> Considering the money involved, you would think they would have moved
>> heaven and earth to destroy NTP's patent claims.
>> 
>> Also, the article states that Port 99 is reserved for pushing an
>> electronic mail message to a wireless pager - I just looked in
>> /etc/services, and I don't see a mention of this. Is the article
>> mistaken, or am I missing something?
>
> The whole email push patent story is b*11***s since message 
> storage/forwarding (i.e. push) exists since radiograms were sent with TTYs 
> over shortwave using repeaters (1940s), and since hams sent Baudot and Sstv 
> (there you have your multimedia) either directly (broadcast bulletins too), 
> or via store/forward, even through sattelites (Oscar), which was a popular 
> sport in the 1980s and still is. It all boils down to what the uspto will 
> consider 'previous art' when awarding a patent (i.e. if a 'message receiving 
> apparatus' can be an ASR32/KSR32 tty mounted in a van or command car coupled 
> to a Collins or General Radio or Telefunken receiver and modem, or does it 
> have to be smaller than x inches on a side, or flat, to be considered 
> 'portable' - or whether a 'message sending apparatus' has to be a computer or 
> can it be a Moore-Mealy automaton implemented with TTL chips and driven by a 
> keyboard or paper tape and magnetic tape, or whether the usual XY matrix 
> switch (which can be as complex as a small phone exchange) used to route TTY 
> signals in a radio switchboard is computer enough, or does it have to be less 
> than - what? - 70 TTLs ? 50 TTLs ? 10 LSIs ? 1 chip ?). Just for laughs, the 
> Wikipedia article on tty:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype
>
> (and follow up to telegraphy and therein TOR and RTTY)
>
> You would be surprised to know how many 'recently patented' procedures and 
> devices have previous art. Joysticks, mouse-like devices (f.ex. pantographs), 
> trackballs, single-click action, double-click action, triple-click action, 
> many of these have been used since at least the second half of the 19th 
> century for various things, many connected to telecom and electricity.
>
> Almost the entire terminology used in IT, as in packets, checksums, headers, 
> envelopes, network numbers, message numbers, station numbers, retransmit 
> counts, ACKs, CCs etc, goes back to the massive tty, telegraph and radio 
> networks used before and during WW2.
>
> F.ex. I know that the multi-click was used for an electric gearbox (this is 
> still used - see paddleshift), thus 'selecting a different function depending 
> on the number of button clicks and their duration' (I won't even mention 
> slide projectors which use said technique to go forward, backward and to the 
> end of the magazine since the 1950s at least).
>
> Also wouldn't you say that dropping a coin into a vending machine and 
> pressing a button corresponding to the desired merchandise would be a 'one 
> click buy' ? Never mind, to each his own. I am not in the usa. All I can hope 
> is that the powers that be elsewhere realise what the adoption of us 
> 'standards' for patents and IP mean for their everyday life.
>
> If the current kafkaesque lawsuit vs. linux, and the previous RIM affair, 
> were no warnings, then nothing will ever be. I especially liked the request 
> made by the us to the EC parts which handle the latest ms antitrust debacle, 
> to 'give ms a fair treatment'. Meaning what, exactly ? Conviction by an 
> european Penfield Jackson followed by forgetting the whole thing ?
>
> Peter
>
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