On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 01:02:17PM -0500, Robert Brockway wrote:

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, John Macdonald wrote:

...

Does anyone have any details of exactly what is patented and when the patent(s) expire?

Patents expire when Mickey Mouse is no longer profitable, or is that copyrights, I can't remember.

That's copyright - control of making a copy of a work of art. Patents cover an idea, not just a particular work; they last for 20 years or so. (I think it's 19 years, with some variation in the details if there is a long time between when the patent gets filed and when it is approved.) The patent trades a monopoly on the idea against full public disclosure of the details of the idea so that once the patent expires, the public can make full use of the knowledge. One example in the computer industry is the RSA encryption algorithm. It was patented - the patent expired in 2000. The underlying concept for public key encryption had also been patented, but that more basic patent expired even earlier. -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml