March 4, 2010 at 16:49Does your program use a linked list? Pay royalties
The United States Patent and Trademark Office does not cease to amaze us: in April 2006, it granted LSI Logic Corporation a patent for a linked list . Linked lists are used in almost any program, which means that any software company in the United States is theoretically threatened with a lawsuit. However, it is unlikely that the company will be able to defend its “invention” in court, since linked lists appeared back in the mid-50s of the last century.
Just in case, let me remind you what a linked list is. Linked list- a data structure, which is a set of elements, each of which consists of two parts: the data itself and a pointer to the next element. This is one of the simplest data structures, it is used everywhere, for example, to implement a stack, queue, hash, skipped lists, etc.
The patent describes one of the varieties of a list, namely a doubly linked list. Elements of a doubly linked list contain two pointers: to the next and previous elements. Thanks to this, the list can be viewed both forward and backward. Compare with the brief description of the patent: “The computer list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different directions. One or more auxiliary pointers provide a quick, consistent crawl of the list with minimal computational time. "Such lists can be used in any application that requires different sorting of the list for various tasks." It took the company four whole years to patent its algorithm. Perhaps they were just looking at the Bureau for someone who did not know about linked lists?
Just in case, let me remind you what a linked list is. Linked list- a data structure, which is a set of elements, each of which consists of two parts: the data itself and a pointer to the next element. This is one of the simplest data structures, it is used everywhere, for example, to implement a stack, queue, hash, skipped lists, etc.
The patent describes one of the varieties of a list, namely a doubly linked list. Elements of a doubly linked list contain two pointers: to the next and previous elements. Thanks to this, the list can be viewed both forward and backward. Compare with the brief description of the patent: “The computer list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different directions. One or more auxiliary pointers provide a quick, consistent crawl of the list with minimal computational time. "Such lists can be used in any application that requires different sorting of the list for various tasks." It took the company four whole years to patent its algorithm. Perhaps they were just looking at the Bureau for someone who did not know about linked lists?