11 Nov
2002
11 Nov
'02
8:35 a.m.
Steve Harris wrote:
Prior art doesn't seem to be very useful in
defending against patents for
some reason (IANAL of course). The recent British Telecom v's W3C fiasco
was won on the grounds that the BT patent's system operated in a different
way to the Web, rather than because of prior art (which there is plenty
of).
otoh, a patent needs to express a new idea afaik. the technique
of buffering before playback is applied to 'slow' data providers
on a regular basis -- all the .mp{1-4}, .ra, .mov, .avi, .swf etc
players do exactly the same thing when playing from a http host,
and they've been doing this for a long time now.
in this light, claiming the patented idea is either original or
new is nonsensical.
tim