-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Sorry, busy right now - unemployment is so fulfilling ;-)
BTW: By a small software company in the south west, when McCarthy is
discussing software patents, she is almost certainly referring to Allvoice.
She mentioned them without naming them several times, indeed I think it
is her only concrete example.
John at Allvoice is pro-software patent, or was last time I spoke to
him, although this puts him in a distinctly small minority of the people
I know.
However the politicians accuse the lobbyists of irrationality, tell us
the legislation won't allow additional patents, and then claim it will
provide extra protection for business. Sorry this is some weird double
think only MEPs can do obviously.
As far as I know John protested features IBM put in it's voice
recognition software. As far as I am aware the IBM product he was
disputing was software only (at least if they bundled a microphone in
the box you didn't need it if you had a microphone.
McCarthy makes it sound like the patent licence was a minor issue, but
taking IBM to court sounded difficult, and at one point John was of the
opinion that using the US courts to prosecute IBM was next to
impossible. I don't think the final deal was a simple patent licence as
last time I looked Allvoice was reselling IBM products for all it was worth.
The features arrived in IBM software after John had demo'ed them to IBM
staff, with a view to selling them software, I got the impression IBM
reimplemented interface features quickly in their next product release
after seeing the demonstration.
Can someone look up the patent?
If someone wants to discuss it I can put them in touch with John.
Right now www.allvoice.co.uk is looking distincty inaccessible, I think
my browser has the plugin but the detection is broke, welcome to another
W32site :(