[Zope] Pub. Company trying to patent object publishing?

[sean.upton@uniontrib.com]

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
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