It's actually worse than that. Last year, the company I was working for
previously was planning to ship code that used RSA public-key encryption
into the USA. It was one-shot, rather than general purpose, so it
avoided the ire of ITAR. That hurdle surmounted, I sat down with the
company lawyer, and we went over the patents (since PKP never ever got
back to us on licensing in the USA, no matter how many times we tried).
Fun. Patents are NOT written in english. They are written in an
aggregate language that uses english words, but with new meanings. (I am
told the process is something like this: Some patents get contested in
court. Court quibbles over meaning of a word. A shade of meaning is
assigned and a decision is reached. Bang, a precedent is born, and the
meaning of the word is changed in similar contexts for all other patent
documents in that country).
Our particular quibble was over the word 'some'. If 'some' meant 'one',
then fine. If 'some' meant 'several' then no go. A brief (and
extraordinarily expensive) consultation with a few US patent lawyers
revealed that it could be either. The matter could be researched, and
it'd cost X dollars per day to do it. (About $800, I think).
Whatever patents used to be for, I feel that what they are for now, is
to protect lawyers, and not ideas. Yes, you could write your own patent
documentation and file it, but when ultimately interpreted in a court in
the context of the specialised language of patents, you might find
yourself rudely shocked to find out that your document says nothing much
like what you thought it said. That would be because you assumed that
english syntax and english words equalled english. What you didn't bank
on was the fact that each word has it's own history of definitions and
contexts. @whee.
In Dublin, in the courts, they have a famous woodcut, IIRC. Two farmers,
each hauling on one end of a cow, obviously contentious. Between them is
a lawyer, on a three-cornered stool, milking the cow.
D
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