From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Jun 21 4:56:11 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from shell.webmaster.com (ftp.webmaster.com [209.10.218.74]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AB3BA37B557 for ; Wed, 21 Jun 2000 04:56:07 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from davids@webmaster.com) Received: from whenever ([209.133.29.2]) by shell.webmaster.com (Post.Office MTA v3.5.3 release 223 ID# 0-12345L500S10000V35) with SMTP id com; Wed, 21 Jun 2000 04:55:55 -0700 From: "David Schwartz" To: , "Rahul Siddharthan" Cc: Subject: RE: BT patents hyperlinks... Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 04:56:05 -0700 Message-ID: <000701bfdb77$adfd40f0$021d85d1@youwant.to> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 8.5, Build 4.71.2377.0 In-Reply-To: <20000621042623.A78879@mooseriver.com> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4029.2901 Importance: Normal Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > Another example of what a pathetic joke the US patent office has become. > > Josef For the record, the rule that allowed this to happen has been eliminated. New patents will expire 20 years after they are filed, regardless of when they are issued. Unfortunately, this patent (like the RSA patent) is in the block that predate the new rule, so they get the longer of 17 years after issue or 20 years after filing. This means that patents that take a long time to issue may come into affect many years after people have started adopting the technology believing it to be in the public domain. DS To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message