Title: The Wall

Dear Francis,

I am concerned that some of the ideas I had in my final-year undergraduate Computer Science project might be patentable in America. I would therefore like to publish them in such a way that the date of publication can be proved, if necessary, in order to overturn the patent claim of anyone who later steals them and tries to patent them at everyone else's expense. I know this is cynical but there are some very wicked people out there.

Is C Vu enough for this? That is, if something is published in C Vu by a certain date, can this fact later be proved, given that no libraries take archives? If the answer is not yes then please do not publish any more of this letter.

Essentially the project is an attempt at an extensible conversion system for music languages. It uses user-supplied grammar definitions to generate parsers that read in the input files and transform them into an unordered collection of facts in "tuple space". The tuple space is transformed into the output by interpreting a specially-designed imperative language, which contains primitives for dividing the tuple space into subgroups and running code on each group (e.g. "foreach part"), for outputting all symbols in a given category whose associated expressions are true for the current tuples, and for grouping the output into blocks and formatting them onto pages. Text is handled separately by a pluggable "literary handler" for the appropriate language and character set. The whole is tied together by an "attributes database" that ensures that the use of attributes is consistent across input parsers and output formatters; other methods, such as arbitration in the tuple space, are speculated on. The full dissertation is available at (somewhere).

Should anyone be interested, I can make the full project available once the above has been published.

Thanks, Silas S Brown

I think that Silas has raised an important concern. It is sometimes very difficult to prove that you were already doing something before a patent is applied for. In addition the laws differ from country to country. The UK considers the first to file while the USA uses other criteria.

As both C Vu and Overload have ISSNs they are archived by the British Library and so can be used to claim date of publication.