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- From: Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es
- Subject: [Patents] exclusion of interfaces?
- Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 17:21:22 +0100
On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 12:53:10PM +0100, PILCH Hartmut wrote:
> There is no patent on ASF or MP3. There are just patents on some
> principles that happen to be necessary for ASF and MP3. When looking at
> the patent application there is no way to determine whether this belongs
> to a standard or not.
Taking your comments into account, a solution could be to allow
infrigment on patents when it is absolutely necessary for
compatibility or interoperability. This is similar to the exception
that allows reverse engineering, and has exactly the same spirit:
reverse engineering is normally forbidden to protect the ideas of the
programmer. It would be a contradiction that this law could be
circunvented by patenting interfaces. Although with my proposal it
would be posible to patent an interface, it would not be against the
law to use it for interoperability with existing programs. For
example, it would be illegal to use the ideas of ASF for designing my
own protocol, but it would be perfectly legal to read an existing ASF
stream.
Ramon.
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