13 Dec
2004
13 Dec
'04
12:55 a.m.
On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 05:39:50PM +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
Look, the patenting of stupid things is to be encouraged as strongly as
possible. The US (and other) patent systems will soon colapse under their
own weight and then be discarded.
Apart from encouraging stupid patents, the best thing you can do is ignore
it completely. When and if you get a cease and desist letter you do the
following:
0) Get the patent holder to provide enough information for you to
figure out if you might infinge or not.
1) If you are out of jurisdiction you may want to disregard the
patent anyway.
2) Get the patent documents and see if the patent can be challenged.
3) If you think it can be challenged, state so publicly in the web
page for the software and tell the patent holder that you will
challenge the patent validity if they try to bring it to court.
4) If it can't be overturned, say sorry to the patent holder and pull
the software for the 2-3 weeks it takes to reimplement the code
working around the patent.
i like this approach, especially the 'encouraging stupid ones'.
a few weeks ago, i looked at Yin, an f0 estimation algorithm. i
wrote to the author to know if it was ok to release it under the
GPL. he replied 'the algorithm is patented but i think there
should be no problem'. i am not qualified to judge on point 2,
but i seriously doubt on its validity, besides we do not have
software patents in Europe. and i went to point 3 (updated):
http://aubio.piem.org/news/YIN_patented_and_GPL.html
now i wonder when someone will get a patent on making additions.
bye, paul