The Real Inventor of Wireless Email? 106
theodp writes "The NY Times reports on Geoff Goodfellow, possibly the real inventor of wireless e-mail, who says NTP was concerned that his earlier work might undermine its patent claims and went to some lengths to ensure that it did not, including gagging Goodfellow during the RIM lawsuit. Not only did high-school dropout Goodfellow - who hung out as a teen in the lab of Doug Englebart -
describe wireless e-Mail in 1982, he implemented it in the early 1990's."
Re:OMG, a comms channel. We could, like, communica (Score:5, Interesting)
Thomas Jefferson, the original formulator of what is and is not patentable in America would disagree with you somewhat. He was rather stricter in his ideas of what was a patentable invention, i.e., the sort of invention that could be given a government enforced monopoly on copying.
He understood the difference between invention as an idea which could be passed mind to mind and no man or government has the right to control and the invention which was a device which required manufacturing; and thus could be held as a monopoly by force of arms.
Under Jefferson the Morse Code would not have been patenable, because it is a just an alternative alphabet. A pure abstract idea; and one already prevelant at that.
It was the telegraph that was patentable.
KFG
Re:OMG, a comms channel. We could, like, communica (Score:3, Interesting)
WTF do I care what some guy who's been dead for a few centuries *may* have thought? I've got two centuries of history on him, in a field (human innovation) which has evolved beyond his possible imaginings. If you want to resurrect him and get him up to speed opn what he missed, I'd love to talk it over with him. But speculating on what he may have thought absent such knowledge, and worse yet, giving his thoughts the weight of some sort of prophet? Pathetic. Think for yourself about what's changed. That's what he'd have done, I'm sure.
Re:OMG, a comms channel. We could, like, communica (Score:3, Interesting)
Jefferson is one of the people that helped write the Constitution, wrote quite a few papers back in the day pertaining to our government, and generally set the mood until Andrew Jackson came along and screwed everything up. We know quite clearly what he intended because he wrote about it. Same with the other founding fathers. Anyway, the beauty of this is that we don't care what technology you use. We only care about what it does. Yes, technology moves on. But the basic fundamentals of how it works, remarkably, don't advance as much as you'd think. The internet is similar to the telegraph networks of old, but you guessed it, technology makes it much more advanced. Still, the basic ideas are the same -- electronic signals going back and forth between two locations (with a few pit stops in the middle).
The reason people talk about Jefferson and friends is that they had a much smaller view of what government should do. Even with all the technology we have now, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, et al. would never have passed the DMCA, would never have given in to the media cartels, would never have allowed patents to be as frivilous and prevalent as they are today. Even the founding fathers who were more for restrictive government (I restrain from liberal/conservative as those lines have shifted significantly over time) would cringe at some of the junk that goes on today. I think we need to get back to the old-school way of thinking with our government. While they didn't have the internet back then, didn't have wireless email, didn't have DVDs and CSS, etc., I would trust them to regulate it a lot more than I do the current, post-WW2 regime. That is, they wouldn't regulate it. Companies would be free to restrict us, and we'd be free to circumvent that restriction. Patents for wireless email would never be granted.
Re:IANAL (Score:5, Interesting)
The patent (Score:2, Interesting)
From my understanding, the patent in dispute here has to do with the ability to "push" email content to a device. RIM's solution to this was, as I understand, to change their methodology so that the client software asks "Do you want to read this?" and then PULLS the message instead.
If my understanding of it is correct, that's one helluva frivilous patent.
What if the NTP patent is invalidated? (Score:3, Interesting)
Stiffer penalties (Score:1, Interesting)