Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 23:52:15 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org (Arun Sharma), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: On "intelligent people" and "dangers to BSD" Message-ID: <200003232352.QAA03123@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.20.0003231206170.31732-100000@theory1.physics.iisc.ernet.in> from "Rahul Siddharthan" at Mar 23, 2000 12:15:20 PM
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> > > > actually the only thing affected by the patent, in any case, > > > > since that is Unisys' (Terry Welch's, actually) contribution. > > > > The LZ (Lempel-Ziv) decoder will decode both, and is not patent > > > > protected. I would have to look it up, but I'm pretty sure > > > > that patent has expired, unless it was submerged (filed but not > > > > executed) prior to GIF images becoming common on the net. At > > > > > > I think I read that it's supposed to expire in 2003. > > > > Try 1999: > > > > http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US04558302__ > > Isn't the lifetime of a patent 20 years from date of filing? The > above page says it was filed in June 1983. It is 14 years from date of issue for patents filed before the new patent law took effect. There are still plenty of submerged patents out there which were filed before the cut-off date, when the new rules went into effect. They will remain submerged until they are executed. Think of them as "trained attack patents". Patents filed after the cut-off date are 20 years from date of filing, regardless of date of issue. The reason this is so is that the US has a Constitutional premise that something which is not illegal can not be made illegal. This is called "ipos facto"; a loose translation is "a law after the fact". This is why you can own short barrelled shotguns in the US, so long as they were made before the law making them "illegal" went into effect. The consequences of not having this legal premise codified in the Constitution would be the ability to: 1) Dislike something that happened 2) Get elected 3) Pass a law making it illegal 4) Arresting the original person who did the thing you didn't like, and trying them under the new law In one word: tyranny. So for example, if we had patent reform that resulted in the term of process patents on algorithms and copyright on code being reduced to a term of 2 years, it would be 20 and 50 years after the death of the author, respectively, before the reform actually took effect. > Besides, 1999 is the year Unisys suddenly started demanding $5000 > from websites which use "unlicensed" GIF's. > > http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/lzw-license.asp > > The page contains a "clarification" on licensing of GIF's > dated September 1999. Their earlier announcement on the $5000 > fee was not long before that. It seems a bit strange if the > patents were supposed to expire the same year. See <http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/>. 1999 was the last year in which the patent was in effect. You will see that it has the same patent number as the one I referenced previously. RSA executed similar license agreements. It is a common practice to get as many people as possible to agree to "vastly reduced license fees" just before a patent expires, in order to accomplish two things: 1) Get a legally enforcible ongoing royalty stream in place, in order to ensure royalties well after the patent expiration because of the contractually committed royalty obligations. 2) Milk as much one-time revenue as possible out of a soon to expire patent, as a last ditch effort to obtain revenue. PS: You are incorrect about when Unisys first attempted to enforce the LZW patent; it was 1993. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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