Have a look at these two patents…
Did Microsoft just patent hardware character skinning and procedural synthesis ? :o
* Markus_Persson hugs living in sweden. 
yeah, i’m happy to be in europe too, but for how long? µ$ and his many friends are constantly trying tu persuade de parlament to aproove software patents here too :-\ . I really hope that our politicians continue saying no to a source of abuses like the us patent system is.
[edit] added the url [/edit]
They are more like 3D transformations of an object, and communication between GFX card and CPU. Of course abstract talked about some other text than the body.
In the second patent, it clearly states the creation of a second set of data from a first set of data, whereby usually the second set of data is more descriptive and it then goes on to give an example about graphics…
and the first patent is definetly about 3d mesh skinning, i read it all…
DP
I think the EU should be pressuring the US to drop software patents.
Many of us in the US would join our voices to such a cry.
And I am a patent holder.
Trying to make more money from their IP, I see they also have one out for double-clicking…
Computer software always seems to fall into that grey area when it comes to Patents and even Copyright.
Just you wait when they’d start to openly patent mathematical equations.
This is ridicilous.
Companies are patenting inventions that shouldn’t be pantented. There should be stricter laws about what can be patented, and methodologies should NOT be patended. Imagine if Object-Oriented Programming methodology was patended, you think the programming-world would have adopted it if everyone had to pay some money to be able to write a single OOP line of code? Or if retrieving information from a database and display it on a webpage was patented?
In the end, if this sort of patenting will continue then people won’t respect it anymore.
I do think that patents are necessery, but in some practical manner!
Patents have definitely gotten out of control. I did a lot of patent research about 5 years ago, and actually sent a Preliminary Patent Application for a software solution I developed. The problem is that to get a full patent, you have to have extraordinary research of prior art, and airtight legal wording, and that costs big $$$. So a patent has really become out of reach for the average person, and even if you got it, protecting it can be just as bad. A big company like Microsoft can easily tie up a smaller company in courts and make the cost of protecting a patent more than it’s worth. And then they have the ability to get these ‘crap’ patents. I think the patent laws need a major overhauling.
pattens shuld be free and companys should not be avil to patent somthing that is already in use by other companys/users
patents are ok for device specifications, but not for software, software should be similar to physic equations. you cannot patent “a procedure to calculate a body’s energy from its mass and acceleration”
I totally agree. I’m sure copyright law has gone through this overhauling, when computers became more widely used. I remember looking into this (a little at uni years ago) and copyrighting software used to fall under literary works, but it became ridiculous and was given a very good going over.
Very happy when the patent software bill was thrown out by the EU Parliament:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4655955.stm
This article contains the very important words that everybody needs to remember: [quote]Software is already protected by copyright.
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