[gclist] speaking of patents...

Emery Berger emery@cs.utexas.edu
Sat, 15 Dec 2001 16:06:42 -0600


> "Emery Berger" <emery@cs.utexas.edu> writes:
> 
> > I received a letter last night and another this morning from the CEO
of
> > MicroQuill, Inc., asking me to "cease & desist" distribution of a
> > pre-release version of Hoard (www.hoard.org, a scalable memory
> > allocator).
> 
> You're writing from an .edu address.  At least here in Germany, you
> cannot infringe patents by publishing research results.  Is this
> different in the US?

I don't know, but in any case, I am distributing software, not just
publishing research results.

> 
> > It seems to me that in addition to me, Geodesic would plainly be
> > violating this patent. The patent filing date is August 1996, and I
> > can't believe there isn't substantial prior art.
> 
> It might be possible that there is no prior art for the cominbation of
> DLL code injection and heap manager replacement. :-(

There's definitely prior art, but I'm not at liberty to discuss it
(yet).

> Could you post the patent number?  I can't find this patent in the
> USPTO database.

The patent numbers are 5949972 and 6035426. You can look these up at
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm.

-- Emery