Re: legal status of David Brownell's zcip code

On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 05:39, David Brownell wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 December 2004 8:09 pm, Andreas Hofmeister wrote:
> >
> > About date of patent expiry see
> > http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=2434
> 
> I read that differently than you did:  those patents
> fall into the "20 years from filing" (1985) clause,
> so they get extensions like the RSA patent.  (Or like
> Mickey Mouse, but not so extreme!)  August 2005.

&@%! patent stuff. Given that mentioned text says (in programer
compatible language):

date expire(date filed, date issued) {

  if( filed > "June 7, 1995" )
    return filed + 20y;

  if( filed <= "June 7, 1995" && issued <= "June 7, 1978" )
    return issued + 17y;

  if( filed <= "June 7, 1995" &&  issued > "June 7, 1978" )
    return max( filed + 20y , issued + 17y);
}

... evaluation of 

expire(filed="March 21, 1985",issued="August 25, 1987") 

... results in "March 22, 2005", (not August)

Beside that, it was not clear wheter that patent in question was
applicable at all, because it talks about automatically assigning the
equivalent of a mac address to a machine, not about mapping a network
address to a (fixed) mac address.

I assume Apple's patent folks just did a keyword query on their patent
database, for what patents may could be applied (thats maybe also why
IPR was claimed on the other patent #4,661,902 which obviously has no
connection to the topic).

Oh, and as a last point, these patents are US patents only. Using all
that in other places (as europe, yet) would be still leagel even if
there was any merits in th IP claims. 

Ciao
  Andi


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



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