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And in fact, recent cases came out pretty much like that. The
defendant claimed the litigant's technology was substantially
different because of name changes and the judge saw right
through it. The main defense against patent wars is to
getchaSome and barter. Sad but so.
Unfortunately, 80/20 philosophies aggravate the problem
because we end up leaving so much room for "innovative and
patentable approaches". So in effect, by standardizing
ahead of deployment, by simplifying and then using our
publicity machines to claim new and different instead
of 'pretty good but improved', by leaving a lot of need
to know bits unsaid to ensure the technology will be
a winner, we dug a hole and climbed into it.
Now it is filling with water and the tallest guy lives.
len
From: jcowan@reutershealth.com [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
Bob Wyman scripsit:
> 2. We must stop defining extension mechanisms to ensure that
> the use of any extension clearly prevents the extender from claiming
> that an extended format is an instance of the named base format. (In
> this way, if someone adds proprietary extensions to XML, HTML, etc.
> then we would be able to say: "It is *not* HTML. Thus, the patent
> doesn't apply."
This isn't going to work. As Abraham Lincoln told us, calling a dog's tail
a leg doesn't make it one (and so a dog has only four legs even if you call
its tail a leg). Judges aren't computers, and aren't going to be fooled
by this simple-minded trick: if two things are substantially similar, a
change of name won't get you out from under the scope of the patent.
IANAL, TINLA.
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