[Pythonmac-SIG] LOLpatents

[has]

Hey folks,

Look what I ran across today:

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=%28scripting+AND+bridge%29.TTL.&OS=ttl/(scripting+and+bridge)&RS=TTL/(scripting+AND+bridge)

Still making my own mind up if I should be worried or amused by it.  
Not being familiar with the US patent system though, I'm curious if  
anyone else has any thoughts.

Do companies like Apple automatically file patents on everything they  
write, regardless of whether or not it's actually novel [1] or even  
correct [2]?

How concerned should third-party developers of very similar products  
(e.g. me) be?

Does the US patent office check for prior art themselves before  
deciding if an application is patent-worthy, or is it contingent on  
the patent submitter and/or general public to provide examples or  
prior art? (And if the latter, how is it done?)


Cheers,

has


[1] e.g. The number of original concepts in Scripting Bridge - or  
appscript, for that matter - wouldn't fill the back of a postage  
stamp. Between Frontier, Mac::Glue, gensuitemodule, JavaScriptOSA,  
aeve, appscript and any other AE bridges I've forgotten, not to  
mention the myriad ORM bridges out there that do similar things, I  
think the territory is pretty well covered. The only noticeably new  
wrinkle that I can think of in SB is its selective automatic  
dispatching of 'get' events as determined by what the reference is  
pointing at (an object attribute vs. a one-to-one/one-to-many  
relationship), although that might've appeared first in RubyOSA.

[2] The bit about SB performing significantly better than prior art is  
BS. ObjC appscript has pretty much the same performance  
characteristics when building and sending events and unpacking  
replies. And all appscript implementations are faster at creating  
application objects - significantly so in the case of large, complex  
applications such as InDesign (15 sec for SB [3] vs 0.2 sec for py- 
appscript the last time I checked).

[3] Via Python+PyObjC as sdp just puked when I tried to create an  
InDesign.h header so I could try it in ObjC.

-- 
Control AppleScriptable applications from Python, Ruby and ObjC:
http://appscript.sourceforge.net