Joerg Mayer wrote:
>
> Hmm, I wonder whether just decoding a patented network protocol violates
> the patent. Personally I don't think so, but then, I live in Germany :-)
> Btw: The situation is the same with Cisco's ISL and we decode that.
Patents usually only cover the "encoding" process, not the decoding
process. Part of the PK-ZIP algorithm is this way, for example. (The
"deflate" algorithm, IIRC.) Info-Zip used to inflate deflated files,
but wouldn't create zip archives with deflated files. Last time I tried
it, though, it refused to touch the deflated files in an archive.
Odd...
If DEC also patented just the encoding parts of the algorithm, we should
be okay writing a decoder for it, especially since we're not really
acting on the data, just showing it in a structured way.
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