> In article <19981220154531.A17409@hazel>,
> Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com> wrote:
> > Wait till products have been out for a while and only
> > sue the big-money makers.
>
> It doesn't work like that; you need to protect your patent against all
> infringers, or you can lose it.
> --
> Shields.
>
No. That's a Copyright. A Patent is yours for 17 years. You can ignore
it, give away rights, sell rights, assign it, etc., anything you want.
Someone may try to declare it as invalid, perhaps obvious, and use
your idea. In such cases both parties generally "agree to disagree" and
cross-license so both can use the invention.
There is too much misinformation about Patents going on here. This
comes about from the College influence where students are taught
that knowledge should be "free to everyone". This is a truly strange
idea considering that the typical College Student has to pay upwards
of $50,000 to obtain this "free knowledge"!
When you work in industry, a company may spend over a million dollars
in software development for some "simple" product. They don't want
the competition to get off free and produce the same product without
having to incur the same kind of development costs. Therefore the
company that invested the money tries to patent as much "intellectual
property" as possible.
There are rules about what can be patented. You can't patent mathematics,
but you can patent an algorithm, presuming it passes the other tests such
as being non-obvious, etc. Software patents fall under the idea
of an algorithm, and are not really "software". The letters patent
application has to be stated in such a way that it is truly portable.
In other words, using 'mov ebx,ebx' as a NOP is not patentable.
In industry, the most common patent is an "improvement" upon something
that already exists. These are easy to defend because you specifically
state "prior art" and try to show how your invention is not obvious
to those skilled in the art.
Cheers,
Dick Johnson
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