question about patent

Callum Lerwick seg at haxxed.com
Fri Mar 27 21:26:19 UTC 2009


On Tue, 2009-03-24 at 23:40 +0900, robert song wrote:
> Hello, everyone.
> Now I am using Pettis-Hansen method as follows to reorder functions.
> http://www.cs.virginia.edu/kim/courses/cs771/papers/pettis90profile.pdf

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=93550

Paper was published in 1990.

> But I found that the algorithm has its patent as below.
> http://www.freepatentsonline.com/EP0459192.html

I took a closer look. That's a European patent:

http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=EP&NR=0459192&KC=&FT=E

Which according to this:

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/patent/p-os/p-journal/p-pj/p-pj-epuk?startYear=2009&startMonth=January&startDay=28th+-+6245&endYear=2009&endMonth=January&endDay=28th+-+6245&filter=EP0459192&perPage=10&status=All&sort=Publication+Date

It "Ceased" on May 8, 2008.

There's some stuff about "Ceased through non-payment of renewal fee" and
"Lapsed" at the end of this page:

http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/inpadoc?CC=EP&NR=0459192A2&KC=A2&FT=D&date=19911204&DB=&locale=

I don't know anything about European patents but that sounds like
"Expired" to me.

The US patent seems to be here:

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5212794.html

With an "estimated" expiration date of June 1, 2010.

Is HP known for being a patent troll? What is their track record with
open source? (I honestly don't really know.)

This patent doesn't seem like much of a threat anymore and in a little
over a year will be completely gone. Imagine the ruckus if HP started
trying to sue everyone over gcc. Why would they bother with such a PR
nightmare on a patent that's a year from expiring? (The answer is,
getting bought out or taken over by patent trolls, like what happened to
SCO...)

... I of course am not a lawyer.
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