Hadmut Danisch wrote:
On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 09:35:13PM +0200, jpinkerton wrote:
the United States Patent Office regarding patent applications. It would be
*most* useful if the people on this list who know of prior art and
obviousness "proofs" could get in touch with that office immediately the
patent application is lodged.
Prior art of what exactly?
I didn't have the time to read all postings since the San Diego
meeting, and I still don't know what exactly Microsoft claims to
have a patent on.
If there is a precise description then we know what to look for in the
archives.
That's the problem - there isn't a precise description and the Microsoft
lawyers might even be right on this one - they don't know what they can
claim until the Patent office actually gives them a decision. Although,
they could let us know what they are trying to claim but then it would
defeat the whole purpose of filing the patent application in secret?
The relevant question to us here, is whether the IPR issue will affect
deployment. Part of it is whether we should ignore the IPR claims all
together if they appear to be meaningless. In RFC 3669, section 4.6
examples are given of IPR claims that were choosen to be ignored by the
WG because they were frivilous. The best quote is this part which in
light of previous posting referencing the ASRG list might be relevant:
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In another case, patent claims were asserted that appeared to be
derived from working group discussion, rather than vice versa (or
independent discovery). The claimants were known to be following the
working group's work when the ideas were proposed, and their patent
filing was considerably subsequent to that time.
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Yakov