On Fri, 24 Sep 2010 13:54:46 +0000 (UTC)
Custos Custodum wrote:

In fact, being patented, it's ILLEGAL to do any of that.

That's not strictly true. The whole point of a patent (from the Latin
'patere' - to reveal) is that an inventor discloses the workings of
his invention to the public in return for legal protection and the
exclusive right to prevent others from exploiting his invention
commercially. It does not prevent others from studying the invention
and designing improvements and even patenting those improvements if
they meet the required criteria. Of course, it will not be possible
to exploit those improvements without the permission of the holder of
the original patent (and vice versa). Whether an individual may build
a patented device for personal 'research' purposes will depend on the
patent law in the country where the patent was granted.

The problem is that with something like AMBE, which is an algorithm,
the patents actually only apply to a few absolutely crucial operations
in the encoding/decoding but the text of the patent is as vague as
possible so that the patent can then be as widely applied as possible
and thus cover many alternative ways of doing the same thing.

It's nothing more than legalised extortion in reality, the existence
of the patent reveals very little to anybody because it's been written
to avoid doing exactly that. So the idea of the protection given
balancing the revelation of commercially beneficial information has
disappeared into the mists of time and patents are now used as a way to
tie your competitors up in legal knots even in the case of obvious and
trivial claims.

Now suppose that someone reverse engineered AMBE and made it available
to radio amateurs by putting the information into the public domain.
DVSI would have to take action to prevent this, because by not doing so
they would be undermining their own patent since failing to defend
against an infringing implementation could easily lead to the patent
becoming worthless.

--

Brian Morrison