Just a little article I came across in the Bangkok Post I.T. Database today. The article can be found at http://www.bangkokpost.com/Database/06Apr2005_datacol57.php Wanda Sloan (Sloan Ranger) has also done a review on Netscape 8 in late beta stage which has an IE rendering engine for sites that don't render properly in the Mozilla engine, which can be found here. http://www.bangkokpost.com/Database/06Apr2005_datacol59.php Regards David Bowen COMPUTER CURRENTS Patent grabbing could harm the Internet The US Patent Office seems to be granting patents for just about anything these days James Hein It was discovered recently by the Public Patent Foundation (Pubpat) that Microsoft had filed a patent application for something very similar to IPv6, which is to be the next generation of the Internet Protocol. This kind of patent grabbing can only damage the Internet as a whole. Over the past few years some companies have been trying to get as many patents as they could registered by the US Patent Office, which seems to have been going through a period where they granted everything. They probably won't ever assert the patent, especially since they forgot to mention any of the work done by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on the process, but like SCO's efforts it could keep a few companies in line who might be worried about Microsoft ever trying to. Pubpat at http://www.pubpat.org is a group that works to protect the public from damage caused by poor implementation of the patent system. Patent number 6101499, "Method and computer program product for automatically generating an Internet Protocol (IP) address," was issued to Microsoft in 2000. By granting these types of patents the Patent Office is essentially supporting the monopolistic nature of a company like Microsoft and at the same time reducing the chances that the next generation of standards will be good ones. In this case the MS employees listed as the inventors were on the IPv6 committee of the IETF, the real inventors of the system. Ironically, in other recent news Microsoft has demanded reform of the US patent system to improve patent quality.