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? 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 patenting file transfer over ISDN. Bob G