Re: legal status of David Brownell's zcip code

On Tue, 2004-12-21 at 10:33, Michael Schmidt wrote:
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> Hi,
> 
> I'm just wondering about the legal status of David Brownell's zcip code.
> Besides the fact that it is GPL (as the source code states), is it
> affected by Apple's patent claims that made the earlier zcip code (by
> Brad Hards etc.) become unavailable?

I googled a bit about that issue. According to
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/apple-ipr-rfc-2131.txt Apple has claimed
IPR based on two US patents, 4,661,902 and 4,689,786.

It looks as if only the second one has any relevance to zcip at all.
However that patent expired in August 2004, so (beside of the general
problem with the crappy patent system) there seem to be no patent
problems anymore.

Reference:

US Pat. #4,661,902
Title:          Local area network with carrier sense collision
avoidance
Filing Date:            March 21, 1985
Publication Date:       April 28, 1987
(http://freepatentsonline.com/4661902.html)

US Pat. #4,689,786
Title:          Local area network with self assigned address method
Filing Date:        March 21, 1985
Publication Date:   August 25, 1987
(http://freepatentsonline.com/4689786.html)

About date of patent expiry see
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=2434


Ciao
  Andi


-- 
Andreas Hofmeister
Coreworks Systementwicklung GbR
Burkheimerstr. 3
79111 Freiburg
fon ++49.761.45684.21
http://www.coreworks.de



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