Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ucsd!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!hplabs!hpda!hp-sde!hpfcdc!hpldola!ritchie
From: ritchie@hpldola.HP.COM (Dave Ritchie)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Re: Phil Katz (PKARC author) sued by SEA (ARC author)
Message-ID: <11770002@hpldola.HP.COM>
Date: 29 Jun 88 07:09:23 GMT
References: <8111@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Organization: HP Elec. Design Div. -ColoSpgs
Lines: 16

>>In article <8111@brl-smoke.ARPA> w8sdz@brl.arpa (Keith Petersen) writes:
>>>2) The original Ziv-Lempel method is patented (#4,464,650 -- 
>>Exactly how is it that this happened? Why is a compression method patentable,
>>but the electronic spreadsheet isn't?
>
>An algorithm *shouldn't* be patentable.  ie: if I figured out the
>quadratic equation today (and no one else ever had before) I shouldn't
>be able to patent it.  If I wrote a program that used the quadratic
>equation I'd just discovered, I could copyright the program but
>not the quadratic equation.
>

  As I recall from the original article in IEEE Computer, wasn't the patent
issued for the use of LZW as a compresson method for data written
to/from disk drives? 

					dave