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Does this patent mean I'm not allowed to do adaptive mesh subdivision?

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Re: Does this patent mean I'm not allowed to do adaptive mesh subdivision?

#21

Post by rasz_pl »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #15
irascible wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your input. I'm a contractor and i've been asked to implement a system for which dynamic mesh subdivision seems like the best solution.. additionally i'd like to subdivide only small regions of the target mesh. I'm wondering if I should raise the question of this patent with my employer... the patent does seem overly broad... just wondering what to do from an ethical/professional standpoint.. There are lot…

I am not a lawyer, and I may not remember this correctly. I believe that it helps your case if you aren't officially "aware" of the patent when you do your work.

Its a myth. In reality NOTHING helps your case, you lose the moment someone sues and forces you to spend up to $500K on legal defence.

Re: Does this patent mean I'm not allowed to do adaptive mesh subdivision?

#22

Post by sukilot »

mcmancini wrote: post #20
rblatz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whose professional ethics? Yours, mine, a patent trolls? Since there is nothing like a PE for computer programmers professional ethics is a very blurry thing. I'd say needlessly opening myself and my employer to trebel damages and claims of being inspired by patents is against my professional ethics. I'll describe what I've done to my employer, and if their legal representation decides to investigate potential patent…

Stick your head in the sand if you want, but for a couple years now there has been PE licensure for software engineering: http://ncees.org/about-ncees/news/ncees-introduces-pe-exam-f... Beyond the NCEES, the IEEE Computer Society and ACM jointly publish a code of ethics for software engineering: http://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics Even if you're not a member, their code of ethics is similar to every…

None of those have force of law or government-regulated licensing. Anyone can throw up a website with heir own definition if professional ethics. An obsolete trade association's website isn't privileged.

Re: Does this patent mean I'm not allowed to do adaptive mesh subdivision?

#23

Post by Nihilartikel »

I wouldn't worry too much about it. I worked out a very affordable licensing deal with Apple to use their patented Alpha Blending technology whenever I do graphics work: http://www.google.com/patents/US5379129

It comes out to mere pennies per frame rendered!

Re: Does this patent mean I'm not allowed to do adaptive mesh subdivision?

#24

Post by tzs »

Completely OT patent trivia: the patent office in the US publishes newly issued patents once a week, which since ~1850 has almost always been on a Tuesday [1].

This makes patents a great source of practice material for honing your skills at mental date to day of week calculation. (See "The Doomsday Rule" [2] if you want to learn a good way of doing this). You have the publication date of the patent itself, and the list of citations to other patents down toward the bottom includes the publication dates of those patents.

[1] I tossed in the "almost" just to be safe. I don't know of any counterexamples.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule There are some improvements to some of the methods given there in this Reddit discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/2qvetr/doomsday_algori...

Re: Does this patent mean I'm not allowed to do adaptive mesh subdivision?

#25

Post by mcmancini »

sukilot wrote: post #22
mcmancini wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stick your head in the sand if you want, but for a couple years now there has been PE licensure for software engineering: http://ncees.org/about-ncees/news/ncees-introduces-pe-exam-f... Beyond the NCEES, the IEEE Computer Society and ACM jointly publish a code of ethics for software engineering: http://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics Even if you're not a member, their code of ethics is similar to every…

None of those have force of law or government-regulated licensing. Anyone can throw up a website with heir own definition if professional ethics. An obsolete trade association's website isn't privileged.

I guess I don't understand what you mean by a PE not being government-regulated licensing? If you mean that a software engineering PE isn't mandated for work, then I agree that's true but I think that's short-sighted in view of the trends for safety-critical projects. Regardless of government mandates, I see it as problematic from a liability standpoint to sign off on safety-critical projects now that the cat is out of the bag.

Bringing it back to the top of the thread, I think that willful ignorance is a bad recommendation, would not help in a legal situation, would be negligent, and would be contrary to a professional code of ethics. Maybe you feel that a consultant or someone working on areas outside of the safety-critical domain doesn't need to follow a professional code or act in a professional manner? Completely disagree if that is the case.

As far as IEEE-CS and ACM being "obsolete trade associations", agree to disagree. I'm not aware of a better trade organization than those two.

Honestly, I don't understand the backlash against professionalism.

Re: Does this patent mean I'm not allowed to do adaptive mesh subdivision?

#26

Post by rurban »

pinaceae wrote: post #11

hmm. first of all, never read patents. claiming ignorance is very important should a patent lawsuit arise. now that've read it, good luck claiming you weren't inspired. and awesome job on getting a broader group of HN'ers to read the patent. a new kind of DDOS....

Inspired by a standard algorithm which is in every better geometry textbook and used in the industry far earlier than 1999? Come on, even I wrote such an adaptive polygon smoother depending in the angles of the neighboring faces at around 1996, during the VM boom. It is a required method to get rid of the huge number of automatically generated 3D points from scanners or terrain data, esp. in 3D cards. Games etc.

Use this better method from 1996: "Francine Evans, Steven Skiena, and Amitabh Varshney. Optimizing tirangle strips for fast rendering." In Proc. Visualization ’96, pages 319–326. IEEE Comput. Soc. Press, 1996.

It uses the better subdivision-surface wavelets for Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. There should also be libraries out there to do that.

Re: Does this patent mean I'm not allowed to do adaptive mesh subdivision?

#27

Post by payne92 »

This patent is likely invalid due to the Supreme Court's ruling on Alice last year.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Interna...

It essentially says: abstract methods (e.g. algorithms) have never been patentable. Taking an abstract method and adding a general purpose computer does not make it patentable.

Re: Does this patent mean I'm not allowed to do adaptive mesh subdivision?

#28

Post by deeviant »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #2

if you are going to worry about violating software patents, you might as well stop coding, because you probably violate 100s or 1000s with anything remotely nontrivial

Indeed, perhaps you have used a Linked List before...

http://www.google.com/patents/US7028023

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