Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible

[Drsolly <drsollyp () drsolly com>]

Huh. So, I could still patent it, and make loadsamoney by licencing it 
out.

On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, Nick FitzGerald wrote:

> Drsolly wrote:
>
> > Damn - now that I've suggested it publicly, no-one can patent it.
>
> Nonsense.
>
> To prevent a patent being granted the patent applicant or patent 
> examiner would have to know of it being published.  In practice, at 
> least in the US, that means the applicant won't go looking terribly 
> hard and neither will the patent examiner, as both have (different) 
> vested interests in seeing the patent granted.
>
> To show you how silly this all is, MS has a patent application in 
> process, or maybe even granted now (this was mentioned sometime last 
> year and got its fifteen minutes of feigning, "gosh, golly, ain't that 
> clever" media coverage), for "rootkit detection" that essentially 
> hinges, when you boil it all down, on "boot clean".
>
> MS, as applicant, doesn't want to admit that this is simply ages-old 
> common sense _as applies to doing ANY AND ALL intelligent system 
> investigation_ and dollied it all up in lots of mumbo-jumbo language to 
> make it sound extra-genuis and novel.  The patent examiner won't know 
> enough to realize that this application really only applies general, 
> well-established computer security knowledge to a very narrow, specific 
> aspect of the more general, already known and widely discussed, 
> published and implemented practice, and because of the obscure language 
> MS' lawyers wrapped the application in, any obvious searches on 
> apparently key phrases from the application will not return any 
> apparently related hits, so it _will_ appear novel to the examiner's 
> limited abilities to test its claims.
>
> In future, if/when MS flexes this patent, all the other developers/ 
> practitioners/etc using this technique will find themselves in the 
> AV/Hilgraeve situation -- it will be far cheaper to swallow their pride 
> and pay up (or even go out of (that line of) business) than to 
> challenge such an utterly bogus patent...
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Nick FitzGerald
>
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