[wdb] Allow me some political notes. It does not matter whom we give our sympathy and whom not. '''But'''. As the German magazine c't mentioned, the case mattered of software patents. Software patents are contra-productive. Software patents should be removed from the world. Software patents have no legitimation of existence. [Larry Smith] That's "legitimate existence". They have no "legitimate existence." And I can vouch for that. The only thing I can conceive of that is dumber than software patents is effectively immortal copyrights. In a fast-moving world there is less and less need for such long periods of "protection". Rather than furthering theory and fact in science and the arts they instead become ways of forbidding such progress - always for good business reasons that have ''nothing'' to do with serving customers. Copyright and patent should be good for ten years and ''not'' renewable. If you haven't made money off your patented idea or copyrighted work in 10 years then you probably aren't and the material should go into the public domain. If you ''have'' made money with it, congratulations, your material should now pass into the public domain anyway. And most of all, violations of patents or copyrights should be a tort, not a crime. The United States in particular has the dubious distinction of having a larger percentage of its population in prison than even the most repressive regimes in history. We have problems enough with putting minor criminals into toxic prison conditions and having them come out worse and more violent than when they went in. Non-violent people can only ''survive'' prison by becoming violent. Prisons are now manufacturing centers for the most violent and evil people one can imagine. We do '''NOT''' need to start tossing non-violent offending p2p downloaders in and having ''them'' come back with much more lucrative and violent ambitions learned at the knees of the masters we introduced to them. Thank you for your patience. ---- [Duoas] I've been playing around with images again, and as I will often do when coding in Tcl I will look on the internet to see if someone has coded something more efficiently than I came up with. To my complete ''shock'', Googling "bit replication" took me to a page informing me that two dorks at DEC actually ''patented'' it on 14 March 2000 [http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6038576/fulltext.html]. I can hardly believe that the US Patent office would issue this, but beyond even that... ''I've'' been using bit-replication when dealing with image data since the late 1980's. (It was a common, well-known technique even then.) I've also been tying my shoes by myself my whole life. Does someone have a patent on that? What does it mean to me? Does it mean that I have to go and remove all instances of bit-replication from my code, past and present? Or am I expected to pay royalties to use code a baboon could devise in half an hour? Will I get sued for publishing code that uses it (free or otherwise)? If I have to use multiplication instead I might as well just trash my whole project, as the image processing would become intolerably slow. I'm freaking out here. Is this absurdity actually possible? What can I do? ---- !!!!!! %|[Category Discussion]|% !!!!!!