On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Chris Puttick wrote:
It may interest you all to know that under the BromCom (sorry, Frontline Technology) patent, you will now be asked to pay licence fees if your school uses wireless networks to access student data: My favourite quote from their FAQ is the one about if you use a spreadsheet saved over wireless to collect student grades you should pay licence fees...
See www.frontline-technology.com for more info. If you have good press contacts, connections with networking companies or lawyer friends, let them know. I for one do not appreciate being told I can't use a wireless network (in my house, school, company...) and look at information about students I'm otherwise legally entitled to without paying someone money.
To really take this seriously, shouldn't any school that might use a WAN to access student records get written assurance from whoever provides its telecoms (e.g. BT, NTL) that its data will never be routed over radio?
Depending on how much you want to twist the definition of "radio" you can have this apply to wired ethernet (most of the CSMA/CD protocols were worked out of a radio based system originally) or you can have this apply to any fibre optic or microwave links.
This is a sad example of an `invention' that simply ignores sound design; it really shouldn't matter how the data is moved. It's as silly as
No doubt at the root of the problem is a patent system which allows patents on things the examiner dosn't understand. Rather than a rule of the form "if the initial application isn't in plain English then this entity is now in the public domain".
patenting file transfer over ISDN.
-- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763