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Originally published January 17 2004

U.S. patent office out of control

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

It's another case of patents gone mad: now one company says it owns the patent on CD burning technology and is suing everybody else in town who "infringes" on their patent.

The U.S. Patent office is increasingly under fire for approving silly patents. Amazon.com claims a patent for it's one-click ordering system. A few years back, an individual claimed he held the patent on computer networking. Of course, there's the recent patent scuffle over Microsoft's use of plug-in technology in their browsers.

Patents are out of control... and so is the idea that everything has to be owned and hoarded for financial gain. What ever happened to sharing ideas anyway?



CD burning software developer Optima Technology has sued rival Roxio and threatened any other company that allows users to record information onto a CD-R. Optima's claim centres on a patent the company filed by the company in 1995 and granted two years later. Essentially, it describes the technique used by many CD burning apps and utilities of creating an image of the disc in memory or on the hard drive which appears to the user as a CD. The virtual CD's contents can be updated at will, until the user is ready to burn the contents onto the disc, at which point the information can no longer be changed.


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