BACnet and Software Patents

I attended the BACnet Committee and working group meetings in November, 2009, in Atlanta, Georgia.  During the MS/TP working group meeting, it was disclosed that KMC had applied for a patent which invents automatic MAC addressing for MS/TP devices.  It was surprising and disappointing to me, since the BACnet MS/TP working group had been working on standardizing several mechanisms to allow automatic MAC addressing since early 2008.