[Asterisk-Users] Digium and mailing lists

[Steven Critchfield]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 16:13, Kevin Walsh wrote:
> Steven Critchfield [critch at basesys.com] wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 14:47, Kevin Walsh wrote:
> > > (Americans don't understand freedom.)
> > >
> > Temper your generalizations please. Some Americans understand it just
> > fine. Look at efforts by groups such as the EFF and PUBPAT for trying to
> > fix the insanity. 
> >
> You're right, of course.  I should have said:  The vast majority of
> Americans don't understand freedom.
> 
> > 
> > BTW, go look at
> > http://www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/patents/database/pat-list.pdf
> > 
> > Under this I see where patents from the US have licensing declarations
> > stating they have counterparts in Canada, France, Germany, GB, Japan,
> > Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Taiwan, Austria,
> > Australia, Hong Kong, 
> >
> I don't know what they mean by "counterparts", but I do know that
> software patents are not legal in Europe or England.  It's possible for
> a few dodgy patents slip past the clerks (they can't all be Einstein),
> but there's no way that they could be enforced in the courts over here.

Maybe it did slip past, but can you afford to fight a patent fight
against NTT? I doubt you have access to that kind of funds. So right now
any unlicensed use even through Europe and the Islands would constitute
IP theft. We all know what kind of crazyness surounds that term right
now.

BTW, after reading the NTT patent for a moment, it does look like they
patent a mathmatical method. I see steps to subtact this from that to
compute something else. If I can skim over the abstract and see
mathmatecal methods, so should any examiner. It also was granted after a
challenge. So it probably received extra scrutiny. Maybe the extra was
another pass over a examiners desktop. 

So we are back to the original situation which is to pay Digium for the
licenses to the G729 codec that they negotiated on our behalf. Then you
are legal even in Europe.
-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>