Licensing mathematics

  Dear Sirs/Madams,

    I speak as a professional scientific researcher, who has been 
required by my employers to patent several rather trivial ideas in the 
domain of data/image compression.

    The W3C's RAND plans are unconscionable.

    The web will fork, and you will lose any meaningful influence.

    In particular, the W3C will lose any ability to generate income. 
Consequently, your Intellectual Property parasites will need to move on 
to some other source of easy pickings.

    Please, can we have the lawyers and politicians go back to the good 
old days of trying to legislate the value of Pi, instead of trying to 
make high school algebraic expressions patentable IP?  At least then it 
was plain to anyone how imbecilic such endavours are.

    Sincerely yours,

    Franklin G. Horowitz, Ph.D.
    Principal Research Scientist
    CSIRO Exploration & Mining
    Perth, Western Australia
    <http://www.ned.dem.csiro.au/HorowitzFrank>


A quote from  Apple's SVG patent #US5379129:

>This invention provides a method for compositing a source image and a   
>  destination image using a mask image to produce a result image in a digital 
>  image processing system. The method is, on a pixel-by-pixel basis, using 
>  the mask image to select between the source and destination images: where a 
>  black color value for a mask pixel selects the color value of the 
>  corresponding pixel of the source image; and a white color value for a mask 
>  pixel selects the color value of the corresponding pixel of the destination 
>  image; and where an intermediate color value for a mask pixel selects a 
>  weighted average between source and destination pixel color values. The 
>  calculations of the weighted average color value are done in color space, 
>  such as on a color component by color component basis. The result image can 
>  be displayed or stored for further use. This method can be described in 
>  boolean expression according to the formula: 
>
>    result=((1-mask)*source)+(mask*destination).
>

Received on Thursday, 4 October 2001 01:04:47 UTC