Text-to-speech

[Paul McGuire]

Brian,

Having reviewed your Cease and Desist petition, I'm afraid I must
dispute some or all of your claims:

1. Your citation of prior art has one or more significant defects:
a. In your citation, "brace" is clearly rhymed with "whitespace", not
"space".  The broad concept of "whitespace" is substantially different
from the specific term "spaces": "whitespace" encompasses all
white-printing characters, including tabs, formfeeds, and carriage
returns, as well as space characters.  In the more general field of
publishing, "whitespace" also includes page margins, paragraph breaks,
and block indentations for embedded quotes or subsections.  In my
submission, "spaces" is specifically intended to narrowly refer to the
character defined in ISO 8879 as ASCII code 32.  Especially, I did
*not* intend to include reference to the ISO 8879 ASCII code 9
character, or "tab".
b. Prior art predates your citation, see Guido van Rossum's post
"[marketing-python] How About a Slogan or Tagline?", at
http://wingware.com/pipermail/marketing-python/2002-March/003851.html,
which includes several notable references to derivative forms of
"brace" and "space".
2. As the Python language's most salient feature is its usage of spaces
for program structuring, as opposed to use of enclosing brace
characters in related scripting languages (Tcl, Perl) and compiled
languages (C, C++, Java, C#), the juxtaposition of "brace" and "space"
in any poetic construct is obvious, and this obviousness further erodes
your IP claim.
3. I think my poem was funnier - "lost track of his braces" (humorous
allusion to suspenders) is a knee-slapper! ("Perl before swine" was
cute, but it's not new.)

Still, I am open to negotiation - would you be interested in
cross-licensing my patent pending rhyming of "van Rossum" and
"awesome"?

Regards,
-- Paul