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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Thu, 5 Sep 2002 17:39:45 GMT
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Viewed:
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929 times
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From the "prior art" section, the discussion of "what a skilled practitioner
in the art would know as VRML" is unbelievable. I wonder if the writer made
these claims in ignorance of the process that became VRML97, or was not even
passably familiar with VRML 1.0 (1995). Lego claim that prior art VRML does
not allow nodes to be reused, and that all geometric data is in global
coordinates. This is totally false, but is used as a straw man to show
Lego's claims to improvements on the prior art.
At any rate, the main ideas in Lego's claims, filed in 1999, could have been
learned from Web3d standards published before 1997, and were in fact
advocated by the W3D committee in requests for proposals in 1995.
VRML 1.0 (1995) See "Instancing" and compare to Lego's claims:
http://vrml.org/fs_specifications.htm
From a further prior art point of view: the business of transforming integer
coordinate systems around axes would seem to have been completely mapped out
even earlier in the days of BASIC with rotatable pixel patterns. (But if
these arts weren't also speciously patented there is no guarantee that a
patent examiner will know that.) For parts read "sprites" or "shape paths",
which are rotated on screen. Several disclosures of this are in the spi.org
database. Also the sections on HP Starbase integer operations are relevant.
From what I have seen of other technical disqualifications to novelty, this
could be understood by a patent examiner to be the same as Lego's
claims--except they're not required to look at it if it's not part of the
patent office file.
Lego's software patent is probably worthless, but there are lots of
worthless patents out there, so it's likely to rest at that.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Lego patent issued
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| (...) I forced myself to read some more claims in the patent last night. Yuck! Look at claim number 19. They seem to be attempting to patent fetching parts on the fly over the internet. Something has to be done about this foolishness! How old is the (...) (22 years ago, 4-Sep-02, to lugnet.cad)
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