Re: Do procmail and spamassassin violate this "patent"?

Loren Wilton wrote:

>> Last year a company (K.C.) received 12 patents on various aspects of 
>> dimming LEDs using an ANSI standard dimming protocol/method.  Their 
>> claim is they invented the idea of dimming LEDs using the same dimming 
>> method used for incandescent lamps and that it wasn't obvious that an 
>> LED could be dimmed.
>>
>> So far, the patents haven't been overturned, but they haven't also 
>> have sued anyone like Nokia for having dimmed LEDs in their phone 
>> keypads...

The other thing to keep in mind is that while procmail and vacation look like prior art when you read the summary of the patent, that does NOT mean that they are prior art when you get into the nitty gritty of the patent.

 From what I read on /., this patent covers some pretty specific stuff that may or may not match procmail and vacation. And even if procmail and vacation are _capable_ of doing it, that doesn't necessarily mean that they qualify as prior art if no one ever suggested that they be used that way (I seem to recall that an example of procmail or vacation being used in the same manner might be required).

For example, vacation is usually used to elicit one specific response from a given recipient user, where the patent in question is for selecting responses from an array of choices, based upon the content of the message (and not the recipient user). It's really more like the abuse auto-responder that yahoo uses than what vacation does.

I'm not saying that the patent shouldn't die a painful death ... IMO, the patent covers what would be obvious from standard procmail recipies.   But, the people on this list are probably not what the courts will have in mind for deciding what is obvious to a typical person or not. Received on Thu Aug 30 19:15:28 2007