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Proir art | 335 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Date is 1992 in Australia, 1999 is just the date of paying the US fee
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, July 10 2012 @ 03:05 AM EDT
When getting a patent (real or insane), the inventor first
applies for a patent in one country, and gets a time stamp
on their application. If they get a patent, the patent is
valid for some years from that time stamp. Until 12 months
after the original time stamp they can apply in other
countries to make the patent valid there too.
If the first country is the US there is another special 1
year rule, but this is not relevant here.

In this case the Australian "inventor" and his employer
"Swychco/Alice" applied way back in May 1992, and applied
for a US patent on the last possible day (365 days later),
which they got in 1999 (somebody must have been very
thorough checking the application, not sure if it was the AU
or the US examiner). The list of official prior art
references in the US patent is quite long and not limited to
patents.

So anything that was built in Australia in 1998/1999 isn't
prior art, it may even have been a Swychco/Alice product, as
they seem to be (or have been) a real practicing entity with
real activities.

Browsing the patent, this appears to be a patent on a
computerized FutOp stock exchange with automatic execution
of the futures and options actually bought and sold. At
least the first part of the patent seems to apply to
absolutely anything you can trade futures and options in,
not just foreign currency.

Also note that this patent may have expired by now (the
validity period is not stated on the USPTO site), so all the
lawsuits are about what people did before the patent
expired.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Makes me think of SWIFT
Authored by: hardmath on Tuesday, July 10 2012 @ 08:56 AM EDT

Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication

Started in 1973, with first transactions in 1977, SWIFT provides for settlement of international accounts among member companies with a highly redundant computer network.

The phrase "real-time" is suspect in this definition of the patent. Real-time doesn't mean nearly instantaneous. It means meeting strict time constraints, which might be overnight settlements in the context of banking. The crux of the definition is the time constraint (deadline), not the processing speed.

---
"Prolog is an efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem prover." -- Richard O'Keefe

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Proir art
Authored by: Wol on Thursday, July 12 2012 @ 06:21 PM EDT
Bit different I think, but real-time int*ra*-bank settlement was *mandatory* for
building societies and the Trustee banks in the sixties in the UK.

As in, any transactions made had to appear on the relevant accounts
*immediately*.

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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