You're calling it trivial with over 30 years of advancements in computer science behind you. Also, thanks for picking the shortest sample on the page to show that it's trivial.
If it were trivial when the patentability question came up, it wouldn't have been a published paper in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and an active area of publication for at least the next six years.
Whether or not it's trivial today, this was the cutting edge of computer science when the patent was granted.
All of those examples are trivial, they're all the same algorithm. I merely picked one of the more terse, which really has nothing to do with triviality.
Seriously, read that.
You're calling it trivial with over 30 years of advancements in computer science behind you.
Yes, of course I fucking can. The ability to do that is part of what makes a "person having ordinary skill in the art" an important concept. Even 30 years ago LZW represented an incremental improvement on the current state of the art.
Regardless of the novelty of the idea, LZW has always been trivial to implement.
> it wouldn't have been a published paper in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and an active area of publication for at least the next six years.
I am not arguing that it fails the usefulness test, nor that it was not important.
Your "this looks like a pain in the ass to implement" defense of the patent is absurd. You clearly would support the patent regardless, since you seem to be fine with the LZW patents.
You didn't read everything I said about software patents. I oppose software patents because I don't think our society needs them. But then again, you can try to pidgeonhole my opinion if you want to.
I'm talking about patents. You're answering that LZW is trivial today. Yes, it is, but the time difference is huge when you're talking about a patent that is 30 years old and now public domain, especially when you're talking about a "person having ordinary skill in the art" regarding a patent application.
The great thing about threads like this is that we probably agree on the key points, but it becomes a disagreement the moment you escalate your language.
Both the LZW patents and the Judy array patents are software patents...
I am not saying that LZW patents were bad patents because LZW is or was trivial. I am saying that defending Judy array patents because of Judy arrays are hard to implement is foolish because no such defense can be mounted for LZW.
The reason both should be unpatentable is that they are both algorithms.
If it were trivial when the patentability question came up, it wouldn't have been a published paper in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and an active area of publication for at least the next six years.
Whether or not it's trivial today, this was the cutting edge of computer science when the patent was granted.