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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!tikal!sigma!bill
From: bill@sigma.UUCP (William Swan)
Newsgroups: misc.legal,comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.apple,comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.hp,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Apple Challenges HP New Wave, MS-Windows, Potentially OS/2 PM
Message-ID: <1584@sigma.UUCP>
Date: 23 Mar 88 17:54:42 GMT
References: <5480@well.UUCP> <5492@well.UUCP> <535@nunki.usc.edu> <2706@tekigm2.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: bill@sigma.UUCP (William Swan)
Organization: Summation Inc, Kirkland WA
Lines: 25

In article <2706@tekigm2.TEK.COM> phils@tekigm2.UUCP (Philip E Staub) writes:
>>P.S. Gosh, if I had thought of this sooner, I could have copyrighted the use
>>of a KEYBOARD, and put hundreds of people out of work waaay back in the
>>beginning of computer-history...
>Don't laugh. As I recall, either RCA or GE has a patent on the use of CRTs
>for display of alpahnumeric characters generated as a scanned dot matrix.
>Sound familiar? Like in (virtually) every terminal and computer in
>existence.

This is true. I seem to recall it was Sylvania, but in any case, a logic
analyzer company I worked for years ago was notified that we were infringing
on this patent. They offered to license us for the nominal fee of something
like $10 per unit (~$10k machine). Too small to fight, really.

What this would have given them, besides pocket change, is an accurate
knowledge of our sales figures, something our competitors would dearly have
love to have.

As I recall, that patent was under litigation, and the company took a "wait
and see" stance. I've no idea if the case has been resolved.. and my old
company no longer exists.

Patents can be useful for all sorts of things, if you have the right ones.
-- 
William Swan  {ihnp4,decvax,allegra,...}!uw-beaver!tikal!sigma!bill