[Linux-aus] Re: Fwd: Software patents

[Benno]

On Fri Dec 23, 2005 at 12:28:16 +1100, Andrew Donnellan wrote:
>On 12/23/05, Benno <benjl at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
>> 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.
>
>No.
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>Is it really non-obvious? It could be done easily just by analysing
>the sound of the crowd and the visual action. Which is basically what
>the patent says. When there is a lot of cheering in the crowd and a
>lot of noise, obviously it's important.

Maybe, maybe not. Simply coming up with the idea of doing it seems
non-obvious, but I guess that isn't really what a patent is about.

In any case, I think there is clear economic benefit.

>> 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.
>>
>
>It's bad enough.

I disagree, but that is fine.

Benno