[Spambayes] 'Bayes' patent...

[Michael C. Neel]

Looks like the patent office has done it again:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/01/2315239&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=126&tid=155&tid=99
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=6732157&OS=6732157&RS=6732157

(links may wrap).

I'm by no means able to understand patent documents, but this one looks
as if they have a patent on the combo of several anit-spam techniques
and is not as broad as made out to be.  Still, given the usefulness of
sb, a dev dropping the eff an email to put them on their radar may not
be a bad idea.  One area of concern I saw was the use of 'paragraph
hashing' which sounded somewhat like some of the advanced options in
sb.  I'd hate to see sb unable to explore better methods because of this
patent.

Mike
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