I doubt this is enforceable against Bit Torrent, and may be entirely unenforceable. It looks somewhat like a submarine.
The original patent application was first filed in 2000, but the final version was not filed until December 2001. Bit Torrent was published in April 2001, yet the patent does not mention it as "prior art." Clearly BT existed in the marketplace before the priority date of this patent, so not only does it not affect BT, but it may well be "obvious" or an attempt to patent another's invention. The lack of mention of BT is a red flag to me.
I find it rather annoying that public-domain software folks neglect to patent their inventions, think it will keep everything "free", when in fact it just confuses things.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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I doubt this is enforceable against Bit Torrent, and may be entirely unenforceable. It looks somewhat like a submarine.
The original patent application was first filed in 2000, but the final version was not filed until December 2001. Bit Torrent was published in April 2001, yet the patent does not mention it as "prior art." Clearly BT existed in the marketplace before the priority date of this patent, so not only does it not affect BT, but it may well be "obvious" or an attempt to patent another's invention. The lack of mention of BT is a red flag to me.
I find it rather annoying that public-domain software folks neglect to patent their inventions, think it will keep everything "free", when in fact it just confuses things.