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Subject: 
Re: Thumbnail menu CGI script
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.geek
Date: 
Fri, 19 Jan 2001 07:29:21 GMT
Viewed: 
135 times
  
In lugnet.off-topic.geek, Dan Boger writes:
On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 03:12:10AM +0000, Erik Olson wrote:
Besides, it's also illegal now--Altavista is going to sue anybody who uses
this algorithm because they patented it. So be careful. (Yeah, right.)

they've patented what algorithm?  regexping a webpage?  writing spiders???

Yeah, all of that. Including: spidering, spidering more than one webpage
into the same index, putting different categories of the index on different
web pages, and a business model patent for using the web to bypass local
decency laws. Just kidding about the last one.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/16180.html

Absolutely loony.

In case anyone wants to blurt out "prior art!", it was recently clarified
that "prior art" means what is practiced in the patent office, not what goes
on in the real world. If the USPO hadn't seen an algorithm for parsing HTML
before, it was patentable. We can hope that Altavista will succeed in
staging the demise of the software patent.

-Erik (serving time for using a patented algorithm to post messages)



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Thumbnail menu CGI script
 
(...) they've patented what algorithm? regexping a webpage? writing spiders??? (24 years ago, 19-Jan-01, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)

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