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Xref: sserve comp.org.eff.talk:9205 comp.unix.bsd:5820 comp.os.mach:2227 misc.int-property:549 comp.sys.mac.advocacy:741 Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!ucbvax!virtualnews.nyu.edu!brnstnd From: brnstnd@nyu.edu (D. J. Bernstein) Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.mach,misc.int-property,alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.sys.mac.advocacy Subject: Re: Letter asking for help with Apple from the US VP Message-ID: <5541.Sep2920.54.1392@virtualnews.nyu.edu> Date: 29 Sep 92 20:54:13 GMT References: <1992Sep26.163059.24740@rwwa.COM> <29581.Sep2900.20.3792@virtualnews.nyu.edu> <v_+pvad.mcgregor@netcom.com> Organization: IR Lines: 29 In article <v_+pvad.mcgregor@netcom.com> mcgregor@netcom.com (Scott Mcgregor) writes: > More imporantly, would IBM and > Unisys have done so? Might we still not have LZW if there were not > sufficient incentives for commercialization. All the big corporations had huge research departments and thriving technical journals long before patents on computer-related inventions began to appear. > Clearly IBM and Unisys are in a > better position to provide an innovative new product to a large market > than an individual like Mr. Bernstein. This is not clear at all. The inventions we're talking about came to market through _publications_, a resource that I can take advantage of just as easily as an IBM employee. It's not as if IBM introduced a product using LZW. The researchers simply published what they were doing. The time was ripe for LZW; multiple groups discovered it and published it. There is _absolutely no advantage_ to the patent system here. > Perhaps LZW would be widely > used only by "hobbyists" and a "hacker elite" rather than being in use > in many commercial modems and disk drive compression systems. There are more than a million computers running software derived from ``compress,'' no thanks to Unisys. This is a ``hacker elite''? ---Dan