patent

Including a MP3 Encoder with your application

Part of a web application I'm working on turns text into speech and then turns the wav stream into a mp3 using LAME encoder. How would one go about licensing the mp3 encoder with the company that owns the patent so we can redistribute the web application and still be legal and what could be cost be involved with that or would it be bett...

Balancing Mac Experience with Apple Patents

Like (probably) most people here, I'm not a fan of Software Patents. It makes it hard to write software, especially for an operating system like Mac OS X, where you generally want to do things "the Macintosh way". But when Apple patents techniques that they use in their own OS and software, it's very difficult for third-party developer...

Using PageRank or HITS Algorithm for Search engine development

Hi,Is there a form of legal restriction(s) from using Pagerank o HITS Algorithm?I am in the process of creating a geographical search engine,but i am wonder if i can use the pagerank Algorithm or that of HITS. If there are restrictions,will those restrictions still apply if i modify the implementation of the algorithm? Thanks in advanc...

Patent on server side image generation

I was just browsing on server side image generation and stumbled on following link: http://www.encke.net/Article13.html Does any of you know if this holds good any more or not? Did anybody challenged this patent? What does this patent mean? Do I need to respect this patent in UK and other countries too? ...

Is a design pattern considered a patent?

Is a design pattern considered a patent? ...

Is patent infringement transitive?

I'm curious about a the following scenario, and I haven't been able to find a clear answer so far. Say a piece of software X uses another piece of software Y, for example Y might be an open source library. If Y is then found to be infringing a patent held by a third party, is X also infringing and therefore potentially subject to litig...

mp3 is not royalty free - what does that mean for programmers?

extends MP3 is covered by a patent. That means if your app implements the MP3 algorithm, you owe Fraunhofer some money. However, "if you use directshow or quicktime to import the mp3 into your application... then you would not require licenses since 'they' have already paid [Fraunhofer].", is this true? In short what are the ways a d...