On Sat, 18 Dec 1999, Nicole Zimmerman wrote:
> If you were developing software for someone, and decided to patent the
> idea, yes, I think they could claim a right.
<back up, more info here>
there are a lot of legal options here... most employees sign a contract
that diverts all their IP to their employer (remember Woz in Pirates of
Sillicon valley?), and then the employer can be the patent holder, but not
the signee (i think those are the terms)... so the author gets verbal
credit, but not rights to license...
but for the corporation to be the patent holder it costs over $10k ($30k
or so if memory serves), whereas for an individual it's only $500 to a few
k...
but the lawyer fees would kill me... it's been estimated at around $10k to
get adequate legal personnel... fortunately the school offers a few of
these services for reduced prices (simple stuff like patent searches and
free advice - the school doens't resere any rights to the inventions)
> But, this is an independent project... has not been brought up but to a
> few professors (as consultants) and they have actually warned him of
> this possibility.
yup, fairly simmilar things have come up in class, but there are subtile
modifications and some very tricky logic to get the thing moving right...
> It (the ADT in question) probably will not be *finished* until after
> he's out of school anyway.... at least not into the patent-able market
> (and it could be very different by then).
right now I'm going into a finite automata and advanced descrete math and
some statistics that will really help me finalize the algorythms involved,
it might not even be until sometime next year before I have a primitive
demonstration that procuces any real results
> > I think the whole subject of the debate is paternalistic and
> > big-brotherish, personally,
big-brotherish maybe if you don't realize that this is in support of the
acedemic freedom of knowledge... ie I can procuce my invention, sell it,
make money, and still give it back to the general public to further
research into data structures, at the same time protect my investments of
time and skill...
paternalistic: yes, the US is in part a welfare state... it's possibly a
contradition from it's individualistic roots, but not one that I disagree
with... honestly I think a more socialist system like Canada's or the
scandenavian nations' make perfect sense...
-andross (karl)
p.s. i love dselect and my connection speed
(ethernet seems to work faster under debian and 2.0.36, maybe it's just
that "new OS" smell)
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