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Originally Posted by Take1
It seems ever since Rambus embarked on their 'sue for fun and profits' extortion scheme, other companies have seen this as a legitimate way to make money.
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I think you have to go back a bit further. The computer industry has always been a mass of patent suits. The earliest ones I remember are the Apple vs. Atari suite, the Apple vs. Miscrosoft (Excel, I believe) and RSAs suits against Phil Zimmerman over PGP.
IMHO, very few of the patents we are now seeing in the industry should have been granted, and very few
would be granted in the UK where the requirements for inovation are higher. Unfortunately, because some plank in the US grants a patent on "a novel method of transmitting text via electrical signals" we all get charged 10 cents a letter to send emails :roll:
You'll note that the US doesn't take our dumb patents seriously. BT (that's British Telecom) recently lost a patent fight which theoretically gave them a patent over hyperlinked documents (i.e. the whole of the web). But that was a UK patent, so it doesn't count. :wink: