Text-to-speech

[Bill Mill]

On 21 Mar 2005 12:47:07 -0800, Paul McGuire <ptmcg at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> 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"?
> 

T'were two coders in c.l.p
Who liked to argue legally
About copyright
All day and night,
Just to prove their inanity