I read over the article more closely -- it's not the sentence, per se, but the "fact" that was granted. It will be interesting to see what the courts rule -- all precedent that I know of attests to not being able to grant patents on "facts". Though who knows what they will do -- many of the current patenting practices are, as Crichton points out, patently ridiculous (hyuk yuk), and personally I think some of the practices allowed (i.e. patenting business methods) are completely abhorrent and counter-productive to the entire point of the patent system (I don't think they encourage innovation, I think they just give an incentive for companies to attempt to patent any conceivable vague operation they can think of with the hopes of extracting future royalties from people who independently use the same approach). So we'll see... in any case, we certainly don't need to do anything until after the ruling, and I'd be honestly shocked if the Court let patenting a "fact" fly (but then again, I'm shocked that the Patent Office would dare to let such a thing slip by itself -- "facts cannot be patented" is practically a dogma in current intellectual property discourse). In a more lighthearted note, did you know the first patent superintendent in the U.S. did not believe that patents should be distributed publicly, and instead fought to have them kept secret? Very strange episode in early U.S. patent history... unfortunately our current entry on [[William Thornton]] doesn't mention this at all, so maybe I'll add it in when I get some time. FF On 3/20/06, Matt Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: