[botmeister]

The article should read "spherical panning" instead of says "spherical planning".

I think the maximum duration of a US patent is 20 years, and 14 years for a design patent. I'm not sure why this thing is even proceeding forward unless it is possible to sue for past violations many years after the fact. In any event, the patent in question is no longer in effect and may be ignored - unless there's more to the story that I'm not aware of.

Another thing I noticed that whoever created the patent is not mentioned, instead what we have is a legal firm that is trying to extort money from various "big" companies. It appears that the legal firm somehow aquired the rights to the patent. Another observation, is that the legal firm claims to of settled out of court with smaller firms as a means to help fund the legal battle against the bigger companies. I bet that the settlement agreement comes with a kick back payment as a reward should the extortion against the bigger companies succeed.

Patenting software is pretty much the same thing as patenting ideas, or life for that matter. No one can own the thoughts that go on in our heads nor can they ever own my DNA, and I don't care what the "legal"system has to say about it. IMO the entire patent process is a huge mess waiting to collapse. Already it is largely ignored, and most companies assume that getting sued for patent infrigement is simply just another business risk worth taking. I cannot see how any software company (not even a huge one) has the resources to constantly research every algorithm they create to see if a patent exists on it or not.