<story><title>Someone patented linked lists</title><url>http://www.google.com/patents?id=26aJAAAAEBAJ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpark</author><text>This is not a patent on the linked list.  It&apos;s a patent on a modification of the linked list that provides a secondary (and possibly tertiary, etc.) traversal path.&lt;p&gt;The patent should not have been granted, and should be deemed invalid if it ever goes to court, but it is not a patent on just the linked list.  The anti-patent crowd makes themselves look bad by trotting out examples like this and being deceptive about the actual content of the patent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xilun0</author><text>At first I thought that too. But within 1 or 2s, I remembered that linked lists have never been limited to single linked lists (except maybe in poor quality courses), multiple linked lists have been around since Unix and very very probably before, have nothing inherently special, so it&apos;s absolutely all right to both simply call them &quot;linked list&quot; (like the patent properly does in its title) and to consider them as CS 101.&lt;p&gt;The patent is both obviously invalid and properly named &quot;Linked List&quot;. That it is does not cover the single linked list special case does not changes this fact. The title is neutral, and &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; are inferring an anti-patent tendency from a neutral reporting (from which crowd btw?). I would be hugely curious to hear on which base you inferred that.</text></comment>
<story><title>Someone patented linked lists</title><url>http://www.google.com/patents?id=26aJAAAAEBAJ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpark</author><text>This is not a patent on the linked list.  It&apos;s a patent on a modification of the linked list that provides a secondary (and possibly tertiary, etc.) traversal path.&lt;p&gt;The patent should not have been granted, and should be deemed invalid if it ever goes to court, but it is not a patent on just the linked list.  The anti-patent crowd makes themselves look bad by trotting out examples like this and being deceptive about the actual content of the patent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sophacles</author><text>Sorry, but Linked List is class of similar things -- Single-, Double-, Multiple-linkings are all part of the Linked List genre. Just because you associate Linked List strongest with the singly-linked list does not mean that other forms of the same thing, all of which qualify as linked list, can&apos;t be called it as well. You are just being disingenuous -- stop it, that is not cool.</text></comment>