Re: [idn] Alternative Solutions

["Mark Davis" <markdavis34@home.com>]

John has mentioned many other examples of prior art. I will mention one more
example: A paper given in 1997, encoding Unicode in barcodes. This is very
similar to the actual method used in WALID. There are 47 allowable values,
and it uses differencing (like xor) to typically get small values, then uses
a variable number of them.

B3: Ultracode: A Barcode Symbology Encoding Unicode 2.0, at:
http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc10/program.html

<opinion>
It is clear that the US Patent office has thrown in the towel, and is
resting on the courts to do their job for them. There is a massive amount of
prior art for the WALID patent.

Given that the PO doesn't do even the most casual research as to prior art,
even if the IETF chose an alternative -- and that alternative was
implemented -- the PO might even ignore that implementation and grant a
patent to some DILAW company after the fact. There is some non-zero
probability of that, probably near the probability that the WALID patent
would hold up in court.
</opinion>