I'm all for making fun of the patent system. Especially the software patent system. Having written a patent or two myself in the past, I can tell you that it would not be horrendously difficult, but it would likely involve some expense due to the filing fees and so forth. It would be fun to write a patent as a wiki page... :-)
One problem with patents in the open source community is that application for the patent generally should proceed publication of the idea, and filing of the patent must occur no more than one year after the idea has been made public.
-Kelly
At 10:49 AM 3/12/2004, you wrote:
Good grief. The patent system is out of control.
Actually, since the original captcha idea is in fact clever, and since I'm not a totally anti-patent person, I could it being reasonable to reward the inventors of the idea with a 2 year patent. 17 years is an infinity.
I wonder if there are things that we've developed in house here at Wikimedia that we should patent, just to license our patents freely of course, and also to make fun of the patent system.
--Jimbo
Evan Prodromou wrote:
> "TS" == Tim Starling ts4294967296@hotmail.com writes:
>> Here's one idea -- a switch to toggle a captcha.That's an extremely good idea. Only one problem: I believe that there are patent issues around captchas. Not saying that Wikipedia couldn't get a patent license, but it'd have to stay out of the distributed MediaWiki code.
I'm not sure about this and I'm not turning up any terribly informative Google hits except this one:
http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/captcha/history.htm
~ESP
-- Evan Prodromou evan@wikitravel.org Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/ The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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