[LAU] ot-ish: musical scales question

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Tue Jul 6 16:10:53 UTC 2010


On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 8:02 AM, Erik de Castro Lopo
<mle+la at mega-nerd.com> wrote:
> Paul Davis wrote:
>
>> please do not post patent abstracts to this or any other mailing list.
>> US law poses no requirement on an "inventor" to perform a patent
>> search, and a provable lack of awareness of existing patents does have
>> a small but definite impact on the legal result of an infringement.
>
> This is in direct contradiction to the advice Andrew Tridgell (one
> of the lead Samba developers):
>
>    http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents/

Tridgell's argument is that a project is going to get killed by a
patent infringement anyway, so you may as well figure out what's out
there to be as best prepared as possible. I don't think he's wrong -
rather, there are different ways to tackle the issue. In the case of
the (absurd) apple patent that was cited, I have to believe that any
infringment case based on that patent is going to turn out better for
FOSS if there is a robust independent discovery basis. If it turns out
that lots of people have read the patent and tried to workaround it
and failed, I cannot see how that would help an attempt to overturn
it.


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