[7830] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
MetaMAP patents (was Re: Hot Java is here! And it *rocks*)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe English)
Sat Apr 1 21:50:59 1995
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 12:44:08 +0500
Errors-To: procmaster@www19.w3.org
Reply-To: jenglish@crl.com
From: Joe English <jenglish@crl.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www10.w3.org>
mddoyle@netcom.com (Michael D. Doyle) wrote:
> > [attribution lost]
> >
> >P.S: congrats on patent 4847604 - I think I'm gonna be sick...
> >
> That comment is out of line. Is your problem with the MetaMAP technology,
> or with the fact that software patents exist? The MetaMAP approach allowed
> me to implement interactive hypermedia in the form of 8-bit paletted
> "imagemaps" on a 256K PC even before the first copy of Hypercard was
> available for the Mac. The fact that it is a particularly effective
> solution for Web-based imagemaps does not diminish the validity of the
> patent.
And the validity of the patent makes it completely
unsuitable for Web-based imagemaps: this technology
has zero chance of being selected for standardization
by the IETF or W3O because of the patent.
And that's too bad; MetaMAP is a neat idea. Fortunately there's
still quadtrees and fully-discretized quadtrees, which have similar
performance characteristics and space requirements and are
(as far as I know) not patented.
--Joe English
jenglish@crl.com
