6 Jul
2010
6 Jul
'10
6:28 p.m.
On Tue, 6 Jul 2010, Paul Davis wrote:
On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 8:02 AM, Erik de Castro Lopo
<mle+la(a)mega-nerd.com> wrote:
Also, Tridge's worst case is "the project is dead." As
opposed to "the project is dead and I am now liable to
Microsoft for US $250,000 for patent infringement damages."
If you are ignorant of the patent you are infringing on, you
will get away with a 'cease and desist.'
If you knew about the patent and knowingly infringed on it,
you are knowingly disobeying the law, and may well be liable
for damages.
-gabriel
p.s. When you apply for a patent there is also the "Duty of
Candor" that you have to consider -- this requires that you
list every related patent that you've ever seen. Since this
requires careful recordkeeping, lawyers recommend that
engineers don't search for patents.
Paul Davis wrote:
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. 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/