On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 06:21:04PM +0100, Kurt Siegl wrote: > On Thursday 06 January 2005 14:51, E. Hietbrink wrote: > > I do not want to ask the guy this now, but I'd like to know how we can > > *prove* that the features we discuss were present in Netrek/Xtrek in the > > 80's? Anyone still has CVS logfiles? Or what methods could we use for that? > > What I found quickly is an old CD of mine when I left university, which > contains as oldest source distribution the The timestamps from CD's don't matter much because Netrek was so widely distributed from early on. There are court documents that include signed declarations that Netrek dates back to the 80's, and a google search shows 136,000 results from numerous independent web sites with time stamps. The question of "when" cannot be refuted, so the only thing that remains is the question of relevance. That is, does Netrek implement ideas that are substantially similar to the patent claims so as to invalidate those claims based on prior art. I didn't look at the 879 patent, so I couldn't say. _______________________________________________ vanilla-devel mailing list vanilla-devel at us.netrek.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/vanilla-devel