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

[maxwell]

On Thu, 2 Sep 2010 07:24:17 +1200, "mi.barlow at auckland.ac.nz"
<mi.barlow at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> I have also noticed clear cases of independently innovations -- the use
of
> font size or line thickness to represent frequency or collocational
> strength and the use of colour coding to indicate POS information. It
would
> be upsetting if someone patented this type of rather natural
development,
> or the KWIC format for that matter.

I think the general answer is that you cannot patent something that
someone else has already described (or used) in the open literature.  Or
rather, you might get away with patenting it, but the patent won't stick. 
Or at least it shouldn't stick.  

The worry, which has been expressed several times in this thread, is that
in order to defend your claim of prior art, you'll have to pay expensive
lawyerly fees, or reach some kind of less than satisfactory out-of-court
settlement.

So if font size or line thickness has been used to indicate X, and one can
point to dated instances of that, then no one can come along later and file
a patent, and then make you pay a patent license fee.  A fortiori, no one
can patent the KWIC format, which has been around for decades.  (Or again,
if they did sneak it past as a patent, it would--should!--be kicked out in
court.)

   Mike Maxwell
   IANAL

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