Is your OS legal in the US?

chase · Post by **chase** » Sun Jul 16, 2006 8:26 pm

The Inquirer reports that Microsoft is currently being sued over a technique for accelerating application launching using RAM. The patent at issue is Patent 5,933,630. Reading through the patent the basis seems to be to record all the disk blocks read during an applications launch, optimize the list so that the duplicate blocks are removed and the remaining blocks are listed in sequential order, and finally record this list and associate it with the application being launched. Next time the application launches just preread the blocks in the list so that application launches a little faster. I'm sure for everyone here this is a natural thing several of us would think of but to the US patent system it's a unique invention that no one else should be allowed to copy. Is anyone else scared? For once I'm hoping Microsoft wins this one.

earlz · Post by **earlz** » Sun Jul 16, 2006 9:58 pm

yea one thing I actually hope that microsoft does win

I hate our stupid software patent crap

edit:
why does c-r-a-p get censored!? it just means non-sense, or current slang is fecal matter

chase · Post by **chase** » Sun Jul 16, 2006 10:44 pm

hckr83 wrote: I hate our stupid software patent ****

edit:
why does c-r-a-p get censored!? it just means non-sense, or current slang is fecal matter

I guess if a thread needed that word this is as good as it'll get

. Mostly I was playing around with the Word Censoring features of phpBB. I'll remove the censor for that word as long it doesn't get over used, I'd like to keep the site(even the forums) usable as a reference for school-type projects.

earlz · Post by **earlz** » Mon Jul 17, 2006 12:24 am

yea I don't really care, just kinda wierd

piranha · Post by **piranha** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 10:03 pm

Ya know......I think that software theory's and ideas should be completely free.

The "Oh, we thought of this already so you can't use it even though you thought of it all by yourself" idea is nonsense.

Candy · Post by **Candy** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 12:16 am

I try to follow everything that could be done legal in any way, explicitly including licenses, but also explicitly exclusing patents. The guy who invented patenting an idea in an industry that flips over every 4 years that hold for 20 years is an idiot.

As far as I know I haven't broken any currently valid patents, but I'm not sure. I tend to ignore that though, if you happen to live in the USA and use my OS and get sued for patent infringement, that's not my problem.

os64dev · Post by **os64dev** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 2:52 am

As far as I know I haven't broken any currently valid patents, but I'm not sure. I tend to ignore that though, if you happen to live in the USA and use my OS and get sued for patent infringement, that's not my problem.

hear, hear. totally agree. though i wouldn't go to the USA aftwards because they might arrest you when you land. I sure wish i could patent 'filling a patent' that would be hillarious.

regards

Candy · Post by **Candy** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 12:07 pm

os64dev wrote:hear, hear. totally agree. though i wouldn't go to the USA aftwards because they might arrest you when you land. I sure wish i could patent 'filling a patent' that would be hillarious.

I would patent "suing somebody for extraordinary amounts of money or way after the infringement took place to get the most money out of suing somebody by means of applying for a patent on something nearly obvious at the time to use 15-19 years after in a lawsuit". As per legal speak requirement, an idiotically long sentence.

Brynet-Inc · Post by **Brynet-Inc** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 1:10 pm

USA software legality is none of my concern, I like ignoring patents.

I'm proud to be in a country with good cryptography and reverse engineering laws also

Candy wrote:As far as I know I haven't broken any currently valid patents, but I'm not sure. I tend to ignore that though, if you happen to live in the USA and use my OS and get sued for patent infringement, that's not my problem.

I'm not religious, But Amen!

Tyler · Post by **Tyler** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 2:43 pm

This isnt meant to be a flame... just comedic in the theme of things we would like to patent. I would patent bashing windows without giving it any chance at all...

Brynet-Inc · Post by **Brynet-Inc** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 6:19 pm

Well as Foghorn Leghorn once said Tyler..
"Clunk enough people and we'll have a nation of lumpheads."
Or
"That kid's about as sharp as a pound of wet liver."

Combuster · Post by **Combuster** » Sun Feb 04, 2007 4:29 pm

My biggest concern is, who is going to tell me what's patented and whats not. I once happened to get the idea of Z-buffering in 3D to solve the issues about back-to-front rendering with intersecting surfaces, only to realize later that it was standard issue since Quake (or possibly even earlier) without anybody telling me how on earth modern applications solved that. I probably got some suggestions somewhere, so i wont claim I re-invented it, but who knows wether a sudden insight ends up being patented already...

So wether my OS is legal in the US, i dont know. At least the patent and crypto laws here save me from worrying about being sued here. However, I'd like to keep my american betatesters from the FBI without spending half my time browsing the US patent archives.

mindstorm8191 · Post by **mindstorm8191** » Fri May 11, 2007 9:28 pm

From what I understand of patents, you can't get sued for patent stealing if you have taken an idea and made improvements on it, or didn't reverse engineer the system to build it. For example, if company A made a new steel hardening chemical and company B used the exact same thing, company B could be sued. But if company B took the idea and made it better (say, made a chemical that hardened steel and made it more temperature-tolerant), it is technically a new product and they couldn't get sued. Also, if company A and B both created the same product, only in different ways, neither could sue each other.

But I could be wrong about this. This is just how I understand it all.