Re: Dickens 2000 Patent

As far as I know, my employer has not yet received the Dickens letter ... 
thankyou IBM for keeping your customer list reasonably confidential, but 
since it is an open book to your trading partners, how long until a Dickens 
law suit forces identification of 100% of us?

Thanks for the references ... another place Y"all might like to visit for 
some insight into the complex world of patent disputes is the fact article in 
the science fact & fiction magazine Analog January 2000 issue on how patent 
law is being changed thanks to the USA allowing foreign lobbyists to 
influence the nation's capital & UN treaties & WTO usurping individual 
nations laws & constitutions at the local state & federal levels.  

Without me getting into the details here, not all of the nuances I understand 
anyway, the laws on patents are different in different countries, and the US 
system is out-of-step with the rest of the world & while we might like how US 
system has worked for the past 2 centuries, it's democratic uniqueness is not 
long for this world.  We need to be very careful, applying past practicies & 
understandings how something works, to future expectations, when the whole 
system is changing.

The US Patent system has already had some changes due to this international 
effort & more are coming.  The first change was to have the clock start 
ticking on patent expiration from time of applying for a patent instead of 
from time of patent being issued & the article cites a case in which the 
patent office took 40 years to issue it because the staff did not understand 
the technology.

The doomed US system rewards intellectuals who created inventions, while the 
one used by most of the rest of the world, such as the Japanese, places 
inventions totally under the control of large international corporations and 
their lawyers.  100% of US Nobel Laureates & several other bodies of 
intellectual leadership have asked for a national debate on the economic 
infrastructure implications of this change to the US constitution.  I did not 
see anything in the normal media on the topic until Seattle took them by 
surprise.

The article on page 52 is by John D. Trudel who has more info & links on this 
at his web page www.trudelgroup.com

Al Macintyre
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