[OT] Re: Geoworks and their patent

[Tim Bray]

I was at a little angel-investor event late last year, there were 4 startups
presenting to a dozen or so potential angels [I was one of the startups] and
the other three startups all made a big deal about how they either had
already launched their patent applications or had advice from one of the
best patent attorneys in the biz about their stuff being patentable.

Felt kind of left out.

My former company Open Text sold Microsoft a bunch of software back in
the early nineties to index the fulltext of the US patent database.  About
50Gb at that time.  When we were getting this thing going, I amused myself
by going and poking around software patents in the area of full-text search
and retrieval (Open Text's business then).  Sickening.  Folks, it's really 
bad out there.  It is very unlikely that any entrepreneur who wants to build
and sell software can avoid infringing a couple of dozen horse-shit US
patents.  

Einstein used to be a patent inspector in Switzerland.  Clearly the US 
office maintains a lower standard.  -T.

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