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To: Tom Hoff who wrote (2645)	11/16/1998 3:24:00 PM
From: Don Devlin	Respond to of 8393

Thanks for the correction , Tom. Will we have advanced phase change patents after 2003? Don Devlin

To: Tom Hoff who wrote (2645)	11/16/1998 4:10:00 PM
From: Retiarius	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8393

also equivalent to U. S. #4,744,055 ("erasure means") which should be fun to analyze. my notes show that that this and pre-cursor patent 4,667,309 possess initial claims that are very general, but that different drive-makers certainly have varying erase techniques which apply to different circumstances. parameters include write & erase power, modulation method, sequencing of laser energy, and initialization state preparation (he said pseudo-authoritatively...) so, how does a sony or an HP or a Ricoh CD-RW drive, driven by software such as Adaptec's code (one kind erases once per session but writes in different passes, another kind directly overwrites, etc.) read on this patent? an important question is how a drive-related patent can be applicable to media makers. the puzzle here is whether japanese patent law entertains the notion of "contributory infringement", which may be the key to ECD's legal strategy. that is, if any ricoh disk can be used by a drive maker employing the patents' methods, it does not matter exactly how ricoh, wearing the drivemaker vs disk maker hat does it. answering this in the affirmative will allow one to short-circuit some claims analysis as well as study of ricoh's 1991 erase method technical paper (in Proc. Int. Symp. on Optical Memory). it certainly is curious that when may 1998 rolled around that Sony immediately signed up for an extended license but that Ricoh did not. i remain optimistic that none of this good fortune is priced into the shares yet. --retiarius