 | | | Metaballs - regarding patent. | Metaballs - regarding patent. 2005-04-15 - By Raffaele "ThE_JacO" Fragapane
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The fact that you can pretty much patent a general idea, as long as you
loosely pair it up with an algorithm or solution (that sometimes can be
bloody obvious and also pretty much the only efficient way to implement that
idea).
This makes it so that companies with deep pockets can start patenting not
only things they COULD have the right to patent, but also obvious solutions
that other companies would have thought of without industrial espionage or
crosshiring, if not solutions that were already widely used.
The whole debate is a long and twisted one, but there's plenty of reasons to
oppose SW patents and only relatively few to endorse them.
It would be like Phong patenting the idea of averaging shading per pixel
rather then per vertex, even if the idea had already been around for a bit
and other people would have come up with the idea only shortly after.
More then that, some SW solutions are heavily interwoven with the
capabilities of HW to deal with the computation, giving people with deep
pockets an even bigger advantage over small research entities.
The defenders of the SW patents will tell you that if an idea that was
already commonplace gets patented you can always bring that patent claim to
court and set wrongs right... yeaaaah, like if a young Swedish kid working
on linux could be arsed or financed to go against MS or SUN in court because
he wrote a module years before but it was later on patented by a
multinational.
The only people battling for the copyrights would be huge corporations that
even AVID would have problems facing in court, the impact this would have on
small developers would be gigantic.
P.S.
I'm not a fervent opensource advocate nor a linux fanatic, but SW patents
are a scary thing.
~Raffaele Fragapane
~Lead "I'm sure we can make it work"
~Peerless Camera Company
-- --Original Message-- --
From: owner-xsi@(protected) [mailto:owner-xsi@(protected)] On Behalf Of
Alastair Hearsum
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2005 11:12 AM
To: 'XSI@(protected)'
Subject: RE: Metaballs - regarding patent.
Sorry if this is a heretical question and if I haven't thought about this
deeply enough but what is wrong with the idea of patents?
Alastair Hearsum
-- --Original Message-- --
From: Joe Saltzman [mailto:joe@(protected)]
Sent: 14 April 2005 20:39
To: XSI mail list
Subject: Metaballs - regarding patent.
I just did a simple google search.... this is what I came up with.
Seems like GE may hold the patent -- they might have become aggressive in
its enforcement -- do you want to take a chance on an infringement case with
GE? Could you afford to fight such a case? I don't think most people could
do.
Just another reason why software patents are not a good thing IMHO.
Cheers,
Joe Saltzman
Subject 5.11: What is the status of the patent on the "marching cubes"
algorithm?
United States Patent Number: 4,710,876
Date of Patent: Dec. 1, 1987
Inventors: Harvey E. Cline, William E. Lorensen
Assignee: General Electric Company
Title: "System and Method for the Display of Surface Structures Contained
Within the Interior Region of a Solid Body"
Filed: Jun. 5, 1985
United States Patent Number: 4,885,688
Date of Patent: Dec. 5, 1989
Inventor: Carl R. Crawford
Assignee: General Electric Company
Title: "Minimization of Directed Points Generated in Three-Dimensional
Dividing Cubes Method"
Filed: Nov. 25, 1987
You wrote:
I've heard this before and it seems rather absurd. Metaballs were in Soft
3D and Houdini before Rem Inforgaphica patented them.
I have never heard of patents being retroactive.
- -- --Original Message-- --
From: owner-xsi@(protected) [owner-xsi@(protected)] On Behalf Of peterb
Sent: April 14, 2005 1:16 PM
To: XSI@(protected)
Subject: Re: Metaballs....
And it didnt stop any competition for implementing them either...
- -- -- Original Message -- --
From: "Andi Farhall" <andi@(protected)>
To: <XSI@(protected)>
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2005 7:04 AM
Subject: RE: Metaballs....
> daft question i know but which algorithm did soft|3d use? There was
> obviously no patent problem there so how come now.....
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