[Pythonmac-SIG] LOLpatents

[Conan C. Albrecht]

IANAL, but in my watching of open source projects for many years, if  
you have prior work to the patent, you're fine.  If they decide to sue  
you, you can just show that your project predates the patent.  This  
one was filed in 2007, so I think things like appscript are fine.   
(does appscript predate June 8, 2007?)  Again, I'm not a lawyer.

When it comes to software patents, 99 percent of them are bunk.  I  
agree that patents are necessary to let new ideas flourish, but the  
concept has gone way too far.  And especially so in computers.  People  
should get 2-3 years on any patent to give them time to move ahead of  
the competition.  After that, it should be fair game.

Check out this web site on the topic: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Osapa

____________________________________
Conan C. Albrecht, Ph.D.
Information Systems Department
Brigham Young University
Email: conan at warp.byu.edu
Phone: +1-801-805-1615
Web/Blog: http://warp.byu.edu/

On Dec 12, 2008, at 16:27, has wrote:

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pythonmac-SIG maillist  -  Pythonmac-SIG at python.org
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