[Corpora-List] Patent application for "Referent tracking of portions of reality"

[Emmanuel Prochasson]

Le 30/08/2010 22:00, John F. Sowa a écrit :
> Their application would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that
> the first of the three was actually granted a patent that covers any
> program that extracts "meaning" from a text as a "conceptual graph".
> It is sufficiently broad to cover other representations, such as
> semantic networks or any other notation for "concepts".  Their
> application was submitted in 2002 and granted in 2009, despite 26
> years of prior art for conceptual graphs and over 40 years of prior
> art for semantic networks.  See the second URL and abstract below.

The latest "Paul Allen vs. the rest of the world" case (and Apple vs.
HTC, or Oracle vs. Google, started these past weeks), would bring
light on these stupid situations. If we are lucky, the whole software
patent thing will fall down. If not, well, let's all move to the EU,
which has not validated patent software yet (you can submit whatever
you want as long as you pay for that, but you won't be able to defend
it) and as far as I know, in any domain, researchers are not concerned
by that (ie : they can use as many patented technology as they want
for research purposes).

I'd say there's not much to worry about. Patents are mainly used to :
- show to the world that some research has been done (typically,
patent from universities, to improve their rank in the Shanghai
Ranking...) ;
- be able to threatened your commercial opponents, as a dissuasive
weapon (typically, Microsoft, Google and Interval Research who just
woke up from the 90's).
Apparently we are in the first situation.

-- 
Emmanuel

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