Patents use their own specific, strange language. The claims, as modified by other precedents, only apply in certain specific situations which may be different than what a casual reading would imply. And, for any of dozens of reasons the holder may not be interested in ever trying to enforce the patent.
So simply by raising the possibility, causing attention to be drawn, and uninformed discussions to be spawned, people's time is being wasted. If they become uneasy, or start spending engineering effort to 'work around' something that they hardly understand and that may never be enforced, more time is wasted.
And by getting more eyes on the fuzzy patent, you may have put more people/projects at risk of treble damages for 'willful infringement', in the rare case where the patent is actually enforced later, or undermined their ability to make a case for obviousness (because many teams came up with the same approach without seeing the patent).
The better policy is to ignore such "appears to be patented" reports, unless and until there's a credible threat from the holder(s) to enforce in specific ways, as checked by experts. Let these patents (and panicked overbroad interpretations) wither away in unenforced obscurity.
Patenting a data structure sounds ridiculous, but it's a little less ridiculous once you consider how complex the underlying algorithms actually are.
Patent law is a black-on-white subject, either you support it or not. It's impossible to grant some patents under subjective premises and be fair at the same time.
Is that not the job of patent examiners?
I can tell you mathematically how a windmill grinds corn but that does not make my description into a windmill. On the other hand, laying down the mathematical description of a Judy Array IS the array itself!
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Judy_array&dif...
"Removed speculation that this subject is related to the referenced patent. Wikipedia is not a crystal ball or a place to discuss how the law MAY be applied."
tl;dr: patent was done for defensive reasons.
http://preshing.com/20130107/this-hash-table-is-faster-than-...
(yes, this hash table is vulnerable to timing attacks; point is, for many workloads Judy brings in considerable complexity but is actually inferior to other solutions).
See http://nothings.org/computer/judy/ for a more thorough analysis of Judy arrays (at 20 kLoC) versus straightforward hash tables (at 0.2 kLoC).
You can't patent an algorithm, at least not in the U.S. The expression of an algorithm can be patented. Patent lawyers often tell people to replace an algorithm with a system, which is an expression of the algorithm.
