Z:gnu-www-ja-danger-of-software-patents--a7c9d4-And somebody wrote and said, =26/en

And somebody wrote and said, &ldquo;I developed another data compression algorithm that works better, I've written a program, I'd like to give it to you.&rdquo; So we got ready to release it, and a week before it was ready to be released, I read in the New York Times weekly patent column, which I rarely saw&mdash;it's a couple of times a year I might see it&mdash;but just by luck I saw that someone had gotten a patent for &ldquo;inventing a new method of compressing data.&rdquo; And so I said we had better look at this, and sure enough it covered the program we were about to release. But it could have been worse: the patent could have been issued a year later, or two years later, or three years later, or five years later.