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Re: Patents

Guys, I just found this a day or two ago.  I love it, I'm sure the
group will too (off topic, but an EXCELLENT Diversion):

Check out this patent.  Delphion will only show the first page for free, but 
that is enough.  US Patent 5,443,036.

http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05443036__

Or this page for a trademark :-( (registered trademark of Despair, Inc. All 
rights reserved) --->

http://www.despair.com/demotivators/frownonthis.html
http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=75502288

If you are a bit of a sicko like me, the rest of Despair.com has interesting 
stuff to offer as well...

Fred

>From: "Rick Fletcher" <rfletcher@plumdragon.com>
>To: "KC7ZRU - Tate" <kc7zru@arrl.net>, <amsat-bb@AMSAT.Org>
>Subject: Re: [amsat-bb] Garmin Rhino
>Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 07:32:00 -0800
>
> > KC7ZRU wrote:
> >
> > Until that response indicates a patent is granted - it's just two words
> > and a 'dah'. Even then, with the prior art documentation, it'd be an
> > easy target to shoot outta the sky.
> >
>
>Easy, perhaps, but not inexpensive.  That's one reason why so many 
>companies
>take advantage of the ignorant clerks at the USPTO.  I'll never forget an
>incident which occured while I was working at Network General who makes a
>very popular ethernet packet capture/decoder called the "Sniffer".
>Naturally, it also time-stamped the packets it was capturing and, in
>addition to correlating protocol requests with responses, would calculate
>the time deltas associated with them.
>
>One day we received a letter from an attorney informing us that we were
>infringing on his client's patent on calculating deltas between two
>timestamps!  We checked, and sure enough, he had been granted just such a
>patent (Talk about prior art!).  Our CEO was outraged and ordered legal to
>do whatever it took to overturn that patent.  A quarter of a million 
>dollars
>later and we had only completed discovery and interrogatives.  This shocked
>our CEO.  When he asked how much more it would cost to take this fight to
>its conclusion, he was informed it could easily total another $500K!  He
>then asked how much the guy wanted for a "license".  The answer was $150K.
>We settled.
>
>There's a lot of scumbags out there profitting of our our USPTO's vast
>technical ignorance and the high cost of litigation.
>
>73s,
>
>Rick
>KG6IAL
>
>
>----
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