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