Linked List Patented in 2006 477
An anonymous reader writes "Congratulations are in order to Ming-Jen Wang of LSI Logic Corporation who, in patent #10260471 managed to invent the linked list. From the abstract, "A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for various purposes." Good-bye doubly linked list. We should also give praise to the extensive patent review performed by Cochran Freund & Young LLP."
Seperate software patent office (Score:4, Interesting)
If you must have software patents, why not a specialist software patent office to deal with them?
Thanks go to John Breene and Cheryl Lewis (Score:4, Interesting)
Do they get a bonus at the end of the week, for the number of patents they have past.
Penalties (Score:2, Interesting)
This doesn't really surprise me. Most likely this is the work of an over zealous marketing droid looking through some slides and thought, my god, we have invented perfection!
I'd like to think the engineers at LSI aren't going around thinking they invented computer science...
Tom
Re:Prior Art? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Prior Art? (Score:3, Interesting)
Software vs hardware? (Score:3, Interesting)
People are immediatly shouting "prior art!" I don't care about prior art as much as I care about the fact that it's another software patent and unworthy of being patented.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument why Babbage's engine, which uses physical mechanical gears to implement an algorithm, is inherently more patentable than the same algorithm in software. How about if I use an FPGA instead? Is it patentable then?
I realize that software has seen more bad patents than it should, but that suggests that the system should be cleaned up, not tossed. And software patents aren't nearly as bad as the nebulous "business model" patents or "natural discovery" patents.
Note that the worst offender usually offered up as the problem child of software patents - "one-click" - was not a software patent, rather a business model patent.
Who pays? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Patent is on multiply-linked lists (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in lat 70s when I was a junior programmer, I did some hacking in SNOBOL to produce a list of thinkgs that had to be sorted two different ways. I had nodes that were in two separate list at the same time. Had I known I would have patented it (unfortunately I lost the card deck with the source).
Re:Prior Art? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Patent is on multiply-linked lists (Score:1, Interesting)
As part of my work I submit quite a few patents. I've been told by the patent writing companies we use that hanging on extra claims do not invalidate the main claim. You seem to contradict exactly that, and I would be very glad if you could elaborate (or point me somewhere).
Thanks
Re:Prior Art? (Score:2, Interesting)
Takes idiocy to a whole new level, and thrusts it into the hands of the freeking Patent office.
Conspiracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually I'm curious, when was your first experience of a linked list implemented in a highly exposed manner? As far as I recall it was in AmigaOS (but then I am only just young enough to remember that as my first OS and the first OS I cared coding for). A lot of systems do use linked lists, it's a very old (1960's?
Along with tags (tagitems, taglists) and ReadArgs they're things I miss in modern operating systems which seem too 'hidden' and trying to feel too unixy. It's all pipes and sockets and syscalls, blagghhh.. I'm glad QNX puts message passing right in your face, and DragonFly is bringing it all back to me again. I can't wait until someone patents one of those again!
You only need Two Things... (Score:3, Interesting)
I know some people who applied to the patent office very recently. They were hired after only a phone interview, and given a very short time table to make a decision (something like a week). They also try and rope you in for three years with a signing bonus. So it looks like they're desperate for warm bodies.
Once you start though, the first 6+ weeks are training. But given the joys of government bureaucracy, who knows how much of that is actual training in patent law versus pro-life indoctrination.
Re:Software vs hardware? (Score:4, Interesting)
In German law, this would be very simple: You would sue your competitor for "unfair competition". That was for example the way to handle software pirates in the years before it was established that you could have copyright on software. Worked quite well. It is still used to protect phonebooks on CD, or maps, which are not the kind of material that can be protected by copyright: Copying phonebooks and selling the copies is "unfair competition" unless you hired a bunch of people who typed the material in themselves, using a scanner and OCR software to read them or just copying someone else's CDs is "unfair competition" and therefore illegal.
Re:Prior Art? (Score:3, Interesting)
lets say you had a bunch of objects and you wanted to display them in variable order (lets say the contents a folder in this case, listed by name, size and modification date. the user can switch around what the view is sorted by. If you had a multiply linked list you could have the same objects linked together in 3 different ways using different pointers and you could switch between the views without sorting your list.
OK, so that example is kind of contrived but I'm sure there are other situations in which one might use this. Still... this is not original. I would be amazed if nobody had ever used something like this before.
Re:Thanks go to John Breene and Cheryl Lewis (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Software vs hardware? (Score:2, Interesting)
Stating that an algorithm is just an "artifact of math" is perhaps questionable. Now, let me begin by saying that I don't believe that a Theorem etc. should be patentable - that's patently stupid (imagine what would happen if you needed to reference that Theorem in your work - yowzers). However, in mathematics, let us take the example of Andrew Wiles (guy who proved Wiles' Theorem aka Fermat's Last Theorem). Now, by your arguement (or at least an extension thereof), Wiles' Theorem is simply an artifact of maths - yep, I have no problem with this. However, to suggest that somehow this result did not require a huge amount of design work - he had to take areas from well outside the problem's number theoretic roots, and spent 7 years working solidly on it.
The root of my question is how does this work on designing a proof of a Theorem differ from a patentable software, or even a patentable car. The process of creating each of these examples is based upon some initial system - be it a mathematical system, computing system or physical system - and the result is by nature of the system possible (since it's been made). You could say that a n-linked list is a "artifact" of computing, or that my Fiat Punto is an "artifact" of the physical world.
Now, don't think that I'm suggesting that Theorems should be patentable, and equally don't think that I'm saying that cars (read: anything physical) should be unpatentable. The problem we have is that a line has to be drawn somewhere, but we have a large grey area which certainly needs some fiddling. (As another facetious example, consider a game, say Half Life or something. Can't the code be construed to be simple an algorithm which takes certain user inputs and gives certain audio/visual outputs? Shouldn't games and apps be unpatentable if algorithms are? If we can't patent short algorithms, but can patent long algorithms where do we draw the line? Number of lines of code? Some measure of "complexity"?...). Regardless, it's a tough issue...
Jeb
Re:Software vs hardware? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the more likely scenario is that the drug companies are mainly working on chemical solutions to psychological conditions like depression which were often previously treated with counselling. Those 100 million dollar drugs aren't curing anything, they're alleviating symptoms marginally better than the previous patent-protected drug did.
Re:Software vs hardware? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget the legal liabilty protection needed to bring a 'potentially' dangerous drug to the market.
If drugs were made by non-profits, charities and/or the government, the liklihood of bringing a lawsuit against something other than a deep-pocketed capitalist enterprise would be pretty difficult. Don't expect the lawyers to ever let this revenue stream to slip from their grasp.!
Re:Thanks go to John Breene and Cheryl Lewis (Score:4, Interesting)
As a few nearby posts have said, they are apparently desperate for bodies. They seem to be in a chicken-and-egg situation - while they are understaffed, the reputation for stress and being underpaid makes it hard for them to hire/retain examiners. Inability to hire/retain examiners results in the existing examiners being overstressed.
Sadly, for a LONG time, the USPTO was one of the government's biggest moneymakers but was also one of the most underfunded, as all of their income went to what was basically a "generic" fund allocation pool. I've heard efforts are being made to rectify this (i.e. let the USPTO use the majority of what they bring in rather than sending it elsewhere), which should help make things a bit saner.
Re:Seperate software patent office (Score:3, Interesting)
Best way to stop this sort of behaviour (Score:1, Interesting)
Just an idea. I think the framework is already in place (a la GPL for source code) just need to extend it.
I'd hate if someone tried to patent the way I hold my pencil or tie my shoe or tie my tie or any of my handy macros.
Re:Software vs hardware? (Score:1, Interesting)
Now the more likely scenario is that the drug companies are mainly working on chemical solutions to psychological conditions like depression which were often previously treated with counselling. Those 100 million dollar drugs aren't curing anything, . . .
I'm not especially defending drug patents, but those drugs are saving lives in many cases. Counseling does not "fix" a problem that is caused by a chemical imbalance, whether the counseling consists of saying "snap out of it!" or real professional psychotherapy. Same goes for prayer and fasting or any other non-chemical solution you may offer.
I respect every effort to help patients with non-chemical approaches, but don't go dissing psychiatric medications unless you yourself have suffered from delusions, night terrors, or major non-situational depressions.
Of course messing with the chemistry of the brain has different side effects for different patients, so it remains necessary to keep trying new stuff. As to how society should protect these efforts, I agree the current approach is far from perfect.
Re:Software vs hardware? (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, there is a reason why several different antidepressants exist: they have different effects and different side-effects on different people. For me, out of the 7 or 8 drugs I took overall, only two (sertraline and mirtazapine) worked, and sertraline ultimately turned out to have side effects that were so serious that I couldn't take it anymore.
Still, both of these help me a LOT, and while that's just an anecdotal story from one person, I think it's safe to say that they are not nearly as useless as you make them out to be.
Re:Prior Art? (Score:3, Interesting)