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Replying To:
"Windowing" Patent (none / 0) (#3)
by Anonymous User on Thu Apr 22, 2004 at 02:39:43 PM PDT

My personal favorite is the "Windowing" patent granted in the very late '90s.  There used to be a lot of old code that used two digit year values.  With Y2K coming, this became an issue.  When doing other changes on code in '91, I was asked to add logic to extend the two digit years to handle the century, assuming anything below 30 was 2000+.  No more detail than that. The logic I added looked about like this:

If YY < 30 THEN
  CCYY = YY + 2000
ELSE
  CCYY = YY + 1900

I was by no means the first to do this, and it was, of course, trivially obvious.  A few years later years that basic and now common technique came to be called "windowing," but in 1999, I was astonished to find that a fellow at McDonnell Douglas was granted a patent for this, and tried to get many large companies to pay for using HIS technique!  I read the patent, and while it tried to be obtuse, it did nothing more than my code.  And, I later learned, there are easily found examples going back to the '60s.  It never would have occured to me to even think of trying to patent that, any more than "I = I + 1"

The patent system needs major revision.  There is a question of whether it should be possible to patent software at all.  If it is, patents should only be for complex and unobvious logic, and for only a very limited number of years.  It is clear that software innovation is slowing dramatically, and legal battles are a big part of that.



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