[Asterisk-Dev] Re: writing a GPL G.729?

[Steven Critchfield]

On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 09:46 +0100, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote:
> Eric Wieling aka ManxPower <eric at fnords.org> writes:
> 
> > I have NEVER seen ANY statement by a patent lawyer that the G729
> > patents are not valid in some parts of the world.  All I've seen is
> > non-lawyers saying that.
> 
> Have I completely misunderstood patents?  I thought they were national
> -- i.e., if I patent something here, in Norway, at the Norwegian
> Patent Office, I'll have a Norwegian patent, and nobody else can sell
> products incorporating my idea in Norway without paying me a licence
> fee.  My Norwegian patent will, however, have no clout whatsoever in
> the USA.  In fact, I've been told by people who were supposed to know
> these things, that one has to make a trade-off between the cost of
> patenting an invention in N countries, and the gains one expects from
> those patents.  Thus, one applies for patents in those countries were
> one expects large sales volumes to be possible.
> 
> Frankly, I tend to suspect that there are a lot of little countries
> where G.729 is *not* patented, because they don't have patent offices.
> 
> I would expect, however, that G.729 is protected by some sort of
> patent or other agreement covering the entire EU, and thus valid in
> Norway as well.  (No, we're not a member: we want self-determination,
> which is why we have agreed to follow all EU rules and regulations,
> without the membership privilege of taking part in writing them.)

I posted about which countries the patents where first filed for. The
URL for it is...
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2004-October/065227.html
It includes a link to the itu documents that tell you about the patents.

Of course I found this which shows you the ITU treaty.
http://216.119.123.56/dyn4000/dyn/docs/ITSO/tpl1_itso.cfm?location=&id=5&link_src=HPL&lang=english

And guess what, Norway is a ITU treaty signor.
http://216.119.123.56/dyn4000/dyn/docs/ITSO/tpl1_itso.cfm?location=&id=3&link_src=HPL&lang=english

BTW, I don't know what the site names should be above, the links where
found on google using words "itu treaty".
-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>