Subject: Re: Possible patent issue with UTCTime hack

From: [email-masked] (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 14:33:22 (NZDT)

Marc Branchaud <[email-masked]> writes:

>It seems that McDonnell Douglas has patented the date "windowing" that is
>used to get around Y2K problems:

This one's already been discussed in various lists, it's as bogus as many of
the other patents the USPTO is busy churning out (which doesn't help people in
the US I guess, from the report the lawyers behind it were planning to work
their way through the yellow pages starting at Aardvark Software threatening
each company which didn't pay them royalties).  People mentioned prior art
going back two decades without really thinking about it, the last I heard no
lawyers had weighed in on whether you're violating the patent every time you
write a date without the century (which is implicitly using windowing to
resolve the century).

Peter.

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From: "Phillip M Hallam-Baker" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 11:11:18 -0500

> >used to get around Y2K problems:

A thought just occurred to me. The company that now "owns" this hack is
contacting companies systematically asserting the technique to be so
fundamental, so obvious that they MUST be using it...

	Phill