[aosd-discuss] AOP patent

[Curtis Clifton]

Deeper into the patent description the ECOOP '97 is explicitly 
incorporated as part of the patent.  Since the patent applicants were 
the authors of the ECOOP '97 paper, that paper is not prior art but is 
integral to the patent.

IANAL

-- Curt

Robin Green wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 03:29:20PM +0100, Rickard Öberg wrote:
> 
>>Just curious, are you all aware of that "AOP" (and, it seems, all that 
>>it implies) is patented by Kiczales et. al?
> 
> 
> IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), and anyone who needs patent advice should not
> rely on this thread but instead talk to a lawyer, etc. etc. However, I think
> that Claim 1 - at the very least - is invalidated by Kiczales et al's ECOOP
> 1997 paper, which forms "prior art". Under the statute, a patent is barred if
> "the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this
> or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than
> one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United
> States."
> 
> The paper was published more than 1 year before the filing date.
> Unless the filing date listed on the patent is not the relevant
> filing date for the purposes of the statute, it seems clear enough to me
> that the patent should never have been granted in its current form, due
> to the fact that Claim 1, at least, was substantially disclosed in 1997.
> 
> But one should have no illusions that the US patent office tries to be
> scrupulously correct in granting patents. US Patent examiners are rewarded
> for (eventually) approving patent applications, but not rewarded for rejecting
> them. It seems the Patent Office only pays lip service to the legal
> requirements for granting patents. As a consequence, overbroad and invalid
> patents are rife. One only need to look at such absurd examples of granted
> patents as Amazon's "One-Click Shopping" patent, and even
> "Method for Swinging Sideways on a Swing" (an actual U.S. patent).
> 
> Unfortunately, the courts tend to start with the assumption that patents are
> valid, so the burden of proof is shifted more towards the defendant. That
> might explain why Apple and others decided to license Amazon's patent rather
> than face contesting it in court (IIRC). (It indicates to me that 
> the legal system is broken if it is true that large corporations like Apple
> have to pay *significant* amounts of protection money as the cheapest way to
> defend themselves against frivolous infringement claims.)
> 
> The EU system seems to be not much better:
> http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/index.en.html
> 
> I would be interested to know, however, if there are any AOP patents granted in the
> EU or UK (because they could affect me personally).
> 
> On the other hand, perhaps it is better to ignore patents altogether and hope
> for the best. In some jurisdictions knowing about a patent, and then infringing it,
> renders you liable to triple damages. So some patent lawyers recommend that developers
> should NOT perform patent searches to check they aren't infringing on anything (!)
> 
> In addition, it's not feasible for developers to perform patent searches for every little
> technique or piece of code we create. As Linus Torvalds recently noted on the Linux kernel
> mailing list, the choice is simple: either suffer some sort of legal-fear paralysis and leave
> the profession, or continue developing and just take the risk.
> 
> It would be a big PR nosedive for anyone to sue an open source project like the Linux
> kernel or "AspectC# for Mono", or a university research group, anyway.
> 
> In summary: do not assume the system is rational.
> 

-- 
Curt

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Curtis Clifton, Graduate Student
Dept. of Computer Science, Iowa State University
www.cs.iastate.edu/~cclifton
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