Re: [Fsfe-uk] Bromcom undead ?

[Ralph Janke]

Ian Lynch wrote:

> Quite so. Any fair minded person would see that transferring
> registration data over wireless when it was previously done over cable
> is no different from any data that was on cable then being transferred
> over wireless so what is unusual or inventive about it?
>
>  
That would be found true today, I suppose. However, the judge decided in 
the year when
Bromcom "invented" and patented it, it was a knowledge only a radio 
technology expert would have had,
but not somebody employed by a school running a computer network and 
deploying a registration system.

I disagree with that statement, since not only radio specialists would 
have known it, I had at that time
a Masetrs Degree in Computer Science and was lecturing this protocol in 
undergrad and graduate courses
at University. I have never been a radio specialist and would have still 
deployed a system in such a way.

Therefore, I would despute the novelty or non-obvious assessment of the 
judge. However because of legal reasons, I
believe nothing can be done in that way. What we could do is offer our 
help to schools in danger in working out
the differences of claim 7 to their wireless network in order to give 
them a defense against the patent, because the
specific parts of claim 7 are not equal to the deployed network in the 
particular school.

Ralph