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Technology Stocks : Ciena (CIEN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Matt Webster who wrote (3237)	9/17/1998 1:17:00 AM
From: George Dawson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12623

Matt, In terms of intellectual property, Ciena is the assignee on 17 patents (searching on the IBM patent server). I think you have to be a patent attorney to make the determination about what is defensible and what is not. Gigabit switching is hard to do and there are proprietary variations. I get the impression that many of those companies prioritize getting the product to market and figure they have time to protect a successful design, because of the time and money it would take a competitor to get up to speed. I have never been able to get a response about whether a custom ASIC for let's say a GB switch is patentable on its own merit. George D.