Subj : Re: Software Patents
To   : comp.programming
From : websnarf
Date : Fri Jul 08 2005 08:42 pm

Paul Dietz wrote:
> CBFalconer wrote:
> > The only effect of the patent was to stop all development cold.
> > Other techniques were developed, and by now have far outperformed
> > LZW. [1]
>
> This is actually an argument used by patent advocates.  The idea
> is that a patent forces competitors to explore workarounds they
> otherwise would have ignored.

Well, that works for LZW, but what about Arithmetic Encoding?  IBM has
a patent on that one (or at least the most reasonably practically known
implementation of it).  See, for its purpose, AE is known to be
optimal.  No work arounds, which involve choosing a different
algorithm, will help.  IBM has managed to patent a method which is
mathematically proven optimal -- even though the patent office doesn't
patent mathematics (Benoit Mandelbrot tried to patent the Mandelbrot
set  and was told that "Mathematics cannot be patented").

-- 
Paul Hsieh
http://www.pobox.com/~qed/
http://bstring.sf.net/

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