[vorbis-dev] patents

[Nelson Rush]

If you guys patent the Vorbis specification (and considering how strict the
patent office is it won't be hard) and make no restrictions on its use,
that's even better than making it patent free. I remember some guy working
on The Gimp patented an image filtering technique he devised and made it
freely redistributable.

This should also help you in a court of law. Not because you patented before
they did, they still have precedence. But because there will be a comparable
specification which was legally patented to provide proof that you did not
copy their specification. Surely precedence will still be an issue in the
court case, but they can't claim they patented the idea of compression
itself. They can only claim a patent on a particular method of compression.

See, they have a patent. This gives them a bit more leverage in a court case
than you patentless heathens. ;-)

If it truly is a different method, write up a specification and patent it.
That is IMHO.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vorbis-dev at xiph.org [mailto:owner-vorbis-dev at xiph.org]On
Behalf Of Gabriel Bouvigne
Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2000 2:20 AM
To: vorbis-dev at xiph.org
Subject: Re: [vorbis-dev] patents

> Please people, if you're going to discuss patents, dicuss the patent
> CLAIMS not the patent description.  And please refer to patents and
> claims by number.  We need to stop rehashing old patent discussions and
> start new more relevant ones, so that in case there are any problems we
> can at least figure out solutions.

I've got 2 questions regarding patents:
*to infringe a patent, de we need to infringe the whole patent, or just any
of the claims?
*when 2 patents cover about the same thing, which one do we need to look at?
The first delivered one, or the first one by application date?

Regards,


--

Gabriel Bouvigne - France
bouvigne at mp3-tech.org
mobile phone: gsm at mp3-tech.org
icq: 12138873

MP3' Tech: www.mp3-tech.org
personal page: gabriel.mp3-tech.org

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