Subject:
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Re: Lego patent issued
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad
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Date:
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Tue, 3 Sep 2002 20:01:26 GMT
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Viewed:
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654 times
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It all becomes ever so much clearer when you understand that "novel" means
"not known to the patent office". (There are also other subtleties that make
a thing novel or not novel.) "Immediately obvious to one skilled in the art"
is not asserted nearly as often as you or I think it should be--I guess
because we're skilled in the art and the examiners aren't.
This is why documentation of prior art such as you mention is so important.
The Software Patent Institute (www.spi.org) is attempting to collect a very
large database of prior art as a matter of record, but has no position (for
or against) software patents as such.
As for prior art, the technique Lego describes in the patent is different
but equivalent to Apple's QuickDraw3D transformation matrix structure. This
was part of Apple's withdrawn submission for VRML 2. Its 3DMF format has
special cases when transformations involve only single axis rotations--but
in Apple's book "3" is not an integer, it's a real number, whereas Lego
would say "3" must be an integer to be covered by their patent.
If that's what is claimed you had better use a decimal point to be free and
clear.
By the way, Apple's patent on QuickDraw3D is perhaps more legit, but just as
disgusting; the "novel" thing they patented circa 1995 is a method of
querying a graphic renderer ("plug-in renderer") of an unknown class to see
which generic subroutines it supports (for example, does it support vertex
lighting attributes, or does it support curve primitives natively vs just
plain line segments.)
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Lego patent issued
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| (...) As usual I'm amazed at the ineptitude of the patent system when it comes to software. I think it's because all patent examiners eventually expect to become patent lawyers, so the more crap they let through the system as examiners, the more (...) (22 years ago, 3-Sep-02, to lugnet.cad)
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