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Going nuclearGoing nuclearPosted Aug 28, 2012 10:58 UTC (Tue) by HenrikH (guest, #31152)In reply to: Going nuclear by drag Parent article: There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw)
No, I think that pure software patents are allowed in the US. Just look at the various compression patents: mp3, gif etc. A Microsoft SQL _user_ in the US got hit and lost a patent case due to a function in MSSQL.
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Going nuclear Posted Aug 28, 2012 11:25 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
Do you have a link? I was under the impression that US patents, like our patent law here in Brasil, did not apply to personal use.
Going nuclear Posted Aug 28, 2012 12:49 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] It was not personal use but corporate use, in fact developers using the product. Here is an example.
Going nuclear Posted Aug 30, 2012 18:25 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
I think what drag means is that the MP3 algorithm is safe to use as long as you don't use it in a device that compresses or decompresses digital audio samples.
So doing the computations mentally or on paper is okay, doing it in any device is supposedly covered by the patents. Which is totally absurd, of course, but unfortunately it is how patent law is interpreted currently.
Personally, I think a general computation device that can be programmed by its user to do many different things should not be covered by such patents, as the computer is only used there as a help to do the computations faster. (And of course "general" means that you can run on it whatever you want, not a locked down & restricted system... ;) )
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