[Linux-aus] Re: Fwd: Software patents

[Benno]

On Fri Dec 23, 2005 at 10:05:59 +1100, Andrew Donnellan wrote:
>
>Also a lot of software patents don't have ANY economic benefit - what
>about when M$ does crazy things like patent algorithms to determine
>exciting parts of baseball games?

Um, I would have thought that the potential economic benefit of determining
the exciting part of a baseball game would be really obvious.

When you have so many games of baseball per week in the US I'm sure
that there is some person there watching all the games to come up with
sports hilight clips and similar things. Or just having something on
your TV that automatically popped up a picture-in-picture when the
action is happening. That would be cool for cricket, I'd love to be
able to sit here coding, and then have the cricket pop up when a
wicket happens, or a six is hit, or something like that. In fact you
could tune your carefactor level, so if I'm doing some really heads
down programming, I would care about a wicket, but if someones on a
hat-trick I still really want to so it.  So having an algorithm to do
this seems pretty cool actually. This seems much closer to a valid
patent than say, 1-click shopping. I would think it definately passes
the non-obvious criteria.

Of course, do M$ really need a patent to exploit such tech, I doubt it.

Not that I agree with software patents, but I think there are plenty
of other better examples of bad software patents that could be used.

Cheers,

Benno