[Fsfe-ie] campaignfor(hampering)creativity

[Justin Mason]

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David O'Callaghan writes:
> : Once an invention has been made public it cannot be patented by
> : another, so it would be impossible for a company to 'steal' open
> : source material.
> 
> I think this is intended to mean that it is "impossible" for a company 
> to patent an idea that has been published as open source software. 
> Except I can think of at least one case where this has happened: Network 
> Associates' broad anti-spam patent which was applied for in December 
> 2002 and comes way after SpamAssassin and also after Paul Graham's 
> article on Bayesian Spam filtering from August 2002 
> (http://paulgraham.com/spam.html).

Actually, that patent isn't such a good example -- it's not as broad as it
was presumed to be by many. (I can't go into too much detail here though,
for various reasons.)

A more recent case is TitanKey's patent on per-user whitelisting and
blacklisting of email messages performed during the SMTP transaction,
which had prior art in the open-source Obtuse SMTPD, among others. See
recent ASRG mailing list traffic if you're curious.  That one is extremely
broad, and with clear prior art, I've heard.

I cannot talk too much about patents in the anti-spam field, as I
generally avoid reading them due to the idiocies of software patents
in the US.

- --j.
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