SV: Re: [sdiy] Flash Drive with Floppy Interface?

[Rainer Buchty]

On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Scott Gravenhorst wrote:

> That's a telling ethical statement.  So we should only obey patent and 
> copyright law if the owner can take us to court?  Mind you, that could 
> happen to you and I don't think you'd be so easy going about it.

There is no ethics in current patent law -- it currently works like 
bullying at school with the bully getting power from the people fearing 
to fight him. Might take two or three to fight him, but then he's 
history.

I've just been involved in a patent revocation process where I served as 
one of several technical experts; my view on the patent system was not 
very friendly before and its even worse now.

Patents are typically not granted for their technical contribution. 
Instead, legalese is used to obfuscate most trivial techniques.

Take the patent Tom referred to, for instance -- which sounds like a 
typical "software patent" to me. Using hardware X to mimic the behavior 
of hardware Y is old news since the ancient days of microprogramming. It 
was something new in 1957 when Maurice Wilkes did it the first time...

People have been using microcontrollers for interfacing to everything 
and anything, including both software and hardware protocol layers -- 
and now the specific use of mimicking the raw hardware layer of a floppy 
interface -- something which every floppy controller does, btw., but 
maybe not microcoded but with a hardwired control -- is a granted 
patent?

I'd say: go for it. This patent will not last very long. In the very 
case the company will go after you (which I presume is rather unlikely), 
I am sure that quite some people here in this list will be more than 
happy to dig up prior art and references showing how inventionally low 
this specific patent is.

Rainer