Hi folks, Not trying to hijack the list for a rant, but I thought this might be of interest to some folks. Belo, a media company that owns a variety of TV stations, newspapers, and online operations, looks to be trying to patent what looks to essentially be object publishing (in a similar sense that Zope has - content-neutral objects published to multiple media). The irony of this all is that I found this in an article on the Newspaper Assn. of America's web site; the article embraces open-standards (XML, industry standards, etc), in the news content industry, and the author of the story is Belo's CTO. It seems to really fly in the face of truly embracing open standards to patent such ideas (especially in-light of the fact that publishing wit XML really demands OO techniques in the first place); and I think that there is plenty of prior art in Zope. Supposing their patents are approved, could/would a company such as Belo start using legal tactics the second that a company or individual someone started developing an open-source product on the Zope platform that cut into the news-content vertical? Or if someone at a newspaper wanted to use Zope's object database for a data-store or content-neutral repository, would they be a target? The second to the last section of the article is what I refer to, at: http://www.digitaledge.org/monthly/2001_01/newlanguage.html I think Zope would be prior art. I'm curious to see what everyone else thinks. Sorry to bring up a non-technical question on a mostly technical-related list, but I think this is something that needs to be discussed... Thanks, Sean ========================= Sean Upton Senior Programmer/Analyst SignOnSanDiego.com The San Diego Union-Tribune 619.718.5241 sean.upton@uniontrib.com =========================