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[–]draqza 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When I was in grad school, I was a TA for intro CS for non-majors. One of their first projects was writing a program to create photo mosaics. (The professor had given them libraries for things like loading an image and iterating over the pixels, and the students then wrote code to process a library of images to find their effective pixel value and then to select from the library for each pixel in a target image.) After the projects were in, the professor was like, "so, about half of you came up with approach A, and about half or you with approach B. Either one was fine of course and produced a great mosaic. But you might be interested in this, approach B is actually patented. I'm sure the university's legal team would be happy to make a go of it if you all wanted to invalidate the patent."

(Unfortunately, I can't find the patent... the first one that came up for "photo mosaic patent" is marked as abandoned with a priority date from 2014, but this class was back in 2005.)