[8507] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Multimedia has been patented
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Farber)
Sun Nov 21 13:59:09 1993
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 1993 13:58:04 -0500
To: Scott W Brim <swb@nr-tech.cit.cornell.edu>
From: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu (David Farber)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
At 13:47 11/21/93 -0500, Scott W Brim wrote:
> >Ok, so you go to someone(s) in the field and you ask what to look for
> >and where (not their opinion, tho that's good also, but where you
> >might find prior art up to the standard needed), as with anything.
>
>Peer review before granting of software patents?
Scott, if the papers I review for our journals and for Foundation funding
are an indicator of the knowledge of people in the field about prior art,
we are in real trouble. The field has a technical memory of about 5 years.
After that it is forgotten unless it is a major breakthrough.
One way to improve this lack of memory would be to "grade" papers and
proposals on their recognition of and knowledge of previous work.
Dave
