Someone is trying to patent Quickwriting

Daniele Ricci daniele.athome at gmail.com
Tue Nov 16 09:05:37 CET 2010


Cross-posting for broadcasting Justus idea.


On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 00:00, Justus Winter
<4winter at informatik.uni-hamburg.de> wrote:
> I am also tempted to mail the person(s?) behind 8pen addressing my
> concerns about his attempt to patent the idea, maybe even challenge his
> position stating that I would not recognize his claim. I believe the
> company is based in France (information is a scarce resource on both
> the 8pen and the companies (3qubits) one, I did a whois query). I'd be
> very interested whether such a patent is enforceable within the EU...
>

I already did a few days ago; just a couple of mails... the interest
part is this:

=== message received from them ===
Dear Daniele,

In fact we did not know about the "Quickwriting" method that you have
pointed out to us. It strikes us as an incredible coincidence.

We're not interested in engaging into a legal debate, but in the
development of an efficient alternative to conventional keyboards on
small devices. However, intellectual property law does apply, and
copying the "8pen" does violate it within the scope set by the patent
previously referred to.

We're not dealing personally with issues that are in conflict with our
patent, or that violate it, but we have instead passed them on to the
lawyers who have filed it.

=== my reply ====
> Dear Daniele,
> In fact we did not know about the "Quickwriting" method that you have
> pointed out to us. It strikes us as an incredible coincidence.
> We're not interested in engaging into a legal debate, but in the development
> of an efficient alternative to conventional keyboards on small devices.

Me neither I am interested in a legal debate, I just wanted to let you
know that your idea is not original, thus it can't be applied for
patenting. Anyway we'll wait for your patent approval.

> However, intellectual property law does apply, and copying the "8pen" does
> violate it within the scope set by the patent previously referred to.
> We're not dealing personally with issues that are in conflict with our
> patent, or that violate it, but we have instead passed them on to the
> lawyers who have filed it.

Of course i won't name my program "8pen for Linux".
I guess editing Quickwriting to use 4 zones instead of 9 would violate
your patent too? If Quickwriting was easily configurable to change the
number of zones, how could this be handled?

===== end =====

> Would anybody care to join me on this one? We could create a message
> or a message template and ask everyone send this message to the person
> behind the 8pen (crowdsourcing seems to be the catchy phrase for this
> approach...).
>
> Cheers,
> Justus
>

Sure, i'm with you 110% :-)

-- 
Daniele



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