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Originally Posted by Dennis Nicholls
RAF,
The order of inventor's names on a patent doesn't legally mean anything, so you can drop the "he's second on the list" when talking about Jano. You are either an "inventor" or you are not.
I presume you are discussing US Patent # 7,257,163 assigned to Silicon Image? For those interested, you can download a free .pdf at www.pat2pdf.org . It goes into a great deal of detail. |
Dennis,
Thanks for the link to the actual HDMI patent. Very informative. And as to my writing and choice of words - you are reading too much into them or are taking them too literally. My mention of "he's second on the list" was a stylistic approach to saying that Jano knows what he's talking about where HDMI is concerned. I chose not to call him the "inventor" of HDMI because that might imply that he was the sole inventor and it was clearly a team effort. I never meant to imply that there is a legal pecking order in such matters. However, having been involved in several situations throughout my life where there were collaborative efforts I do know for a fact that very often the order in which the participants are listed on a document sometimes pays homage to the amount of their contributions - at least in the eyes of the participants or of the sponsors. So while there may not be any "legal" meaning to the order of the names there is often some significance in the community involved.
Let's all agree on one thing - Jano Banks is an authority on HDMI because he is intimately involved in its creation and development, O.K.? That's the point I was trying to get across and I assume that most people understood that without trying to read too much into the way I choose to write.
(I hope these remarks don't come across too harshly because they are intended to clarify, not to get confrontational. I like to think of the HTF as a "glass half full forum" unlike some other venues.)
