Robodini Q&A

[Gusev]

In 1819 the courts basically granted corporations most of the same rights as an individual including the rights provided by the 14th amendment.

Not exactly. The 14th amendment was passed in 1868, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth ... nstitution

[bob]

seems to me that your apology is as phony as they come... to say so much about what you did is a blatant attempt to destroy houdini reputation. Even still as much as I don't like Robert he has done what no other programmer could do. you can re his work but you have no idea how to make your own engine as good as houdini so instead you chop it up... you have divulged a lot of information about houdini publicly without regard to robert when you could have had a private conversation but you chose to openly disclose what you done. Jealousy runs rapid here. I hope you can be sued.

Sorry, your choice of words is poor. "He has done what no other programmer could do" should be rewritten to "he has done what most other programmers REFUSE to do." There is a HUGE difference between the two statements...

[Gusev]

Sure, sure, even trade with it. Which is not very ethical, but legal.

But the GPL never annul the PUBLIC DOMAIN.

Jose, it's perfectly ethical to publish paper copies of public domain books and sell those copies to the public. Some companies do that. I totally agree with you that the GPL on a derivative cannot annul the public domain status of the earlier source.

[Michel]

I live in the US, where patent law does NOT explicitly cover computer software. There are dozens of examples of case law where software patents were thrown out, because the US congress did not consider software (since it didn't exist when patent laws were written.)

What part of the world are YOU from? Copyrights on computer software, on the other hand, are alive, well, and have been enforced many times.

Since obviously you did not look at it I repeat the link to the list of patents covering H264. As you can see many of them are in the US.

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc ... c-att1.pdf

[Adam Hair]

In the US as well. In that you simply can't patent software any longer. This changed at least 30 years ago. The only real protection here is copyright, which can extend to hardware since EEPROMS can be copied, which is copying a binary, which is copyrighted.

On what planet are you living? Software patents are very much alive.
The state of the art video codec H264 is protected by 1000s of patents.

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc ... c-att1.pdf

Just one obvious example.

I live in the US, where patent law does NOT explicitly cover computer software. There are dozens of examples of case law where software patents were thrown out, because the US congress did not consider software (since it didn't exist when patent laws were written.)

What part of the world are YOU from? Copyrights on computer software, on the other hand, are alive, well, and have been enforced many times.

If software was unpatentable in the US, I do not believe that the Defend Innovation website would exist. Nor would there exist a department called "Computer Architecture, Software & Information Security" in the US Patent and Trademark Office.

From what I have read, software patents in the US are alive and well. At least well enough for many to protest against the granting of such patents.

[Modern Times]

..... You should have a better clue of from where the first 5 top engines come from. All of them, and I mean all of them, have reached top ELO using ideas RE from somewhere, or directly or indirectly, through an open source built with heavy use of RE. And the current top engine, that in this case is the offended part, even takes the crown and is the king of the "helped by RE" somewhere in his genealogy tree.

Yes, this is the problem I have with all of this. Some authors branded villains, others as saints. How can some so-called "original engine" authors take the moral high ground when the above is true ? There is just so much hypocrisy about.

Of course there are engine authors who do not study code of other engines at all. Big respect to those authors.

[Gusev]

From what I have read, software patents in the US are alive and well.

Can an invention be embodied in software? I say, yes. Then there should be nothing wrong with software patents.

[Gusev]

"He has done what no other programmer could do" should be rewritten to "he has done what most other programmers REFUSE to do."

Dear Prof. Robert Hyatt, could you please clarify what it is that Robert Houdart did that most other programmers REFUSE to do? Do most programmers refuse to use public domain code in their commercial programs?

[Michel]

Can an invention be embodied in software? I say, yes. Then there should be nothing wrong with software patents.

The problem with software patents is that they stiffle innovation.

Creation of software has a very low barrier of entry. A smart kid in Bangladesh can do it. Software patents artificially raise this barrier. It would be impossible for said smart kid to create a new video codec since he would have to read 1000s of patents covering all kinds of trivialities. Moreover he would have to hire a patent lawyer to do this since only a patent lawyer is qualified to interpret patents.

The patent system was created to stimulate innovation by giving the inventor
a temporary monopoly in return for publishing his invention. While one
may argue that this works to some extent for industrial inventions, it clearly does not work for software.

[Don]

Can an invention be embodied in software? I say, yes. Then there should be nothing wrong with software patents.

The problem with software patents is that they stiffle innovation.

Creation of software has a very low barrier of entry. A smart kid in Bangladesh can do it. Software patents artificially raise this barrier. It would be impossible for said smart kid to create a new video codec since he would have to read 1000s of patents covering all kinds of trivialities. Moreover he would have to hire a patent lawyer to do this since only a patent lawyer is qualified to interpret patents.

The patent system was created to stimulate innovation by giving the inventor
a temporary monopoly in return for publishing his invention. While one
may argue that this works to some extent for industrial inventions, it clearly does not work for software.

I do not believe it works even for industrial inventions.