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Oh yes, I'll be the first to admit that MID
wasn't novel. I had Hytime running out my
ears at that point, had worked on other hypertext
systems (IADS, IDE/AS, the GE ETMs for CASS)
and did my homework researching AI systems,
NLDS and chaos theories, linguistics, and
so on. I didn't know about PIGUI.
The first MID came down to the definition of a
view package, familiarity with midi sequencers,
and opening up the Win 3.1 resource file (that
was what MS should have patented but I'm sure
it seemed silly at the time). So when I sat
down with Neill Kipp to explain what I had
in mind for MID I, his response was, "Oh,
you mean these ARE the objects?!? That
should work."
In other words, MID was a bit of synthesis,
not innovation. No d'oh. But because we
implemented it, published it and that stuff has
been out there for a decade now, it is part
of the prior art documentation that secures
the future. That alone made it worthwhile, IMO.
The hard sell was the MID committee themselves
who were committed to a much grander concept,
but I had a customer with a deadline and Charles
had tutored me on getting it done. ISMID
reflects more of the advanced bits from Hytime.
ISO ISMID is Dave Cooper's work because I
changed jobs at that point. Not oddly, when
MID was being discussed on comp-text-sgml at
the time, the W3C guys, the new SGML to HTML
converts and others were blasting holes
in it. What goes around comes around. Keep
it in mind when people come to this list with
ideas that may conflict with current agendas.
Document it. Document it. Document it.
Prior art is part of due diligence. It
seems people are skipping that part of the
patenting process these days. There is a gold
rush on and claim jumping seems to be in heavy
revival, but now as in the WWWest and the Klondike,
he with the gold rules. That I suspect is why
the W3C is finally facing up to the facts and
amassing legal defense funds. 'bout time too.
Yeah, the plagiarism is massive. Blog keiretsu,
accepting behaviors from Google that would get
Gates put in jail, open source claiming special status
while IBM and others make billions off it, all of the
Spy Vs Spy games, are 'life among the mammals'
behaviors. I don't despair. We've been doing
this stuff for at least 10k years.
"CROG! You copied my buffalo!" reverberates from
the cave to the cubicle. ;-)
len
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@rbii.com]
On Wednesday 17 December 2003 01:59 pm, you wrote:
> I was surprised as I looked into inductive interfaces
> to see MS mystified that they had not originated
> the idea given any mil tech writer's experience
> with the LSAR records for repair procedures and
> that background informed MID design. This stuff
> just isn't rocket science.
... and the MID stuff itself is really a crystallisation of various themes
running around at the time, from some of the PIGUI work, through to HyTime
(albeit, one of the most advanced, in a number of directions, to the point
that it's still fairly advanced).
Last time I checked (maybe 6 months ago), there were over 300 patents or
patent applications with the word XML in the title. Think about that.... I
personally have seen very, very little, that I think is new since 1994 or
so,
so almost every one of those 300 will have significant prior art. Prior art
alone is *not* sufficient for have a patent deemed invalid though, and that
is at least part of the problem.
> The EOLAS patent is generating defensive patenting
> elsewhere.
Well, there are a lot of factors here too. One factor is plagiarism.... it
has
become so common for people (both commercial and open-source) to replicate
any new idea, that people are trying to find ways to protect their
innovations (and many innovations come from small companies... which are
least capable of defending themselves). Patents are one of the options
people
have (though not an inexpensive one, so again, individuals and small
companies suffer).
It's pretty clear the software industry is undergoing a great deal of change
vis-a-vis IP etc. Whether we all end up as consultants supporting open
source
(be that salaried or independent), or swallowed by the behemoths is an open
question.
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