Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 10:47 AM, Adam Back a...@cypherspace.org wrote: hmm Yes and this topic now is more than a bit non dev related. Sorry about that. There seems to be no convenient mailing list format for non-dev stuff or I would Cc and set Reply-To for example? (Web forums somewhat suck IMO). There is the little-used bitcoin-list on SourceForge that claims a rubric of general discussion: https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/?source=navbar I just subscribed there. We can reboot that list with a couple new rules such as a) be good to each other. consistent rude behavior gets the boot. b) anything related to decentralization, consensus, proven data structures or crypto is on-topic -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/ -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...
IMO this list is fine for discussing such topics. Here are some thoughts. I had to deal with patents at Google (my name is on a few, not my choice unfortunately). Many aspects of patent law are deeply unintuitive, so here's the crash course as I was given it. The first rule of patents is *you do not go looking for patents*. US law is written in a really stupid way, such that if you knowingly infringe, damages triple. Because America uses the patent office as a revenue source, basically everything you can possibly imagine is covered by some ridiculous patent so if you go looking you will always find applicable patents on every idea and then you end up potentially much worse off. Most companies (Google certainly included) have therefore banned their staff from reading patents, thus ensuring that the whole point of them, the sharing of knowledge, doesn't actually function! And it's much better I think if we follow the same policy. So *please do not ever mention that suchandsuch is patented on this list*! When it comes to patent law, ignorance is bliss. Patents are written in a heavily obfuscated manner such that actually trying to learn from them is hard work anyway. One reason I wrote up the contracts stuff when I did is to get it out there into the public domain, so people couldn't patent the basics of the Bitcoin protocol. It'll be much better for everyone if new ideas are just put right out into the public domain. *Please do not patent Bitcoin related research you do*, even if you think it's for the best: 1) Defensive patenting doesn't work. The whole idea was mutually assured destruction, you hit me I'll hit you type of logic, but the prevalence of shell/troll companies killed off that idea. Plus it turns out that big companies are quite willing to sue each other into oblivion anyway. Once a patent exists, it'll be used as a weapon by someone eventually, and attempting to fight back is probably not a workable strategy. Far better to ensure the material is simply unpatentable by anyone. 2) Patenting with the intention to sue people using Bitcoin in the same way: well, if you plan to do this, there's not much to talk about you won't make any friends this way. -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On 19 May 2014 17:09:07 CEST, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: The first rule of patents is *you do not go looking for patents*. US law is written in a really stupid way, such that if you knowingly infringe, damages triple. Because America uses the patent office as a revenue source, basically everything you can possibly imagine is covered by some ridiculous patent so if you go looking you will always find applicable patents on every idea and then you end up potentially much worse off. Most companies (Google certainly included) have therefore banned their staff from reading patents, thus ensuring that the whole point of them, the sharing of knowledge, doesn't actually function! And it's much better I think if we follow the same policy. So *please do not ever mention that suchandsuch is patented on this list*! When it comes to patent law, ignorance is bliss. Patents are written in a heavily obfuscated manner such that actually trying to learn from them is hard work anyway. Meh. The world is much bigger than the USA. Secondly that rule makes it difficult to educate people about why patents are as bad as they are. Feel free to continue censoring your own discussion within closed corporate environments. But to say keeping patent discussion off mailing lists is appropriate or wise when the tech news is full of such discussion is silly. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: APG v1.1.1 iQFQBAEBCAA6BQJTekz8MxxQZXRlciBUb2RkIChsb3cgc2VjdXJpdHkga2V5KSA8 cGV0ZUBwZXRlcnRvZGQub3JnPgAKCRAZnIM7qOfwhX0TB/wNZoi5sWj6n3fM7O7T emVbrVpuBwOvUEJAFYGmXgb2KXGdheVRhXfcwteQybLG+M+Ra/HAqLq+1YrPmopE QeldiSc31KAkVLYXQMIfD6QO1PBlvKP7qPLqBEpCc9ocd8XLppTPQ2K8o5soV8VF z6Jt/Hh74xhkhhb/kEzsQ8YKkg+m26WY9Yggu0Qxtb0OTjL86IhEKpH9ijr08jvV TKs+PHwou5rt0dT3vqLd8ogb7xihTPx/7tciaXHCOfvxGsEgtqdTsjdHlCJ6cR9a DrZcrIQnX+s1+YbHs3P4kyBfzNHBwwVuwaf5W5pU6vFp276jhsgT/65J7PqoRmxK AkXg =dk4R -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...
Meh. The world is much bigger than the USA. Secondly that rule makes it difficult to educate people about why patents are as bad as they are. You can easily find examples that are not relevant to Bitcoin if you want to discuss the patent system in general. Feel free to continue censoring your own discussion within closed corporate environments. But to say keeping patent discussion off mailing lists is appropriate or wise when the tech news is full of such discussion is silly. It is both appropriate and wise. Please keep discussion of Bitcoin-relevant patents elsewhere. -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 8:09 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: The first rule of patents is you do not go looking for patents. US law is written in a really stupid way, such that if you knowingly infringe, damages triple. Because America uses the patent office as a revenue source, You have received outdated advice on this point. In Re Seagate (http://patentlyo.com/patent/2007/08/in-re-seagate-t.html) this precident was over-turned (and has subsequently been upheld in other cases). Avoiding willfull infringement no longer requires paying off a patent attorney to get a freedom to operate review. This isn't to say that reading patents is always productive now: They're often nearly inscrutable (especially to people without substantial patent reading experience), and you may discover potential infringement that creates more work for you to sort out (especially since people without patent experience tend to read patents much more broadly than they actually are). There are other defensive approaches which are interesting than hoping to use patents as a counter attack: For one— filing a patent gets the work entered in the only database that USPTO examiners are _guaranteed_ to consult when doing a prior art search, so it may have a fighting chance of precluding someone else patenting the same material later (they may also search the internet and use other resources, but they're guaranteed to consult the existing patents and applications). Patents can also be used defensively as leverage in a licensing negotiation: Without your own patents you don't get invited to the negotiating table at all with someone else who may hold patents in a space that you're working on. These are somewhat thin advantages so great care is required to make sure that things are setup so that badness cannot happen later when inevitable changes of ownership happen. -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On 19 May 2014 20:43:15 CEST, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: There are other defensive approaches which are interesting than hoping to use patents as a counter attack: For one— filing a patent gets the work entered in the only database that USPTO examiners are _guaranteed_ to consult when doing a prior art search, so it may have a fighting chance of precluding someone else patenting the same material later (they may also search the internet and use other resources, but they're guaranteed to consult the existing patents and applications). Interesting. Is that to say a viable strategy would be to apply for patents and let the application lapse? -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: APG v1.1.1 iQFQBAEBCAA6BQJTelGCMxxQZXRlciBUb2RkIChsb3cgc2VjdXJpdHkga2V5KSA8 cGV0ZUBwZXRlcnRvZGQub3JnPgAKCRAZnIM7qOfwhQPlCACjJgJEyMYMtF+/dJJh TgWfVuE7E7QmwgWoQMBo7/5LgO1W5PQt9d3jfQ7gkrdCqTWs4HtA3lcgjdeEQ6ZW QvMFG5/xITVi85v2zlE9CteQZXLBTSI+J7VlkjqnJeftQkklvGjiDtNfaDDsTacV ZNem06V4fmBxNgzqmit2Roilp+NMQb2iM9Ofkr5FbI0cT/kzD/IJd2+Crqsu/uDU 8r2YQY0bbEf2wqxVdq5TSf1rFqqnWKHB3lD1GGRJ8n5BciBmysZL43jct8YABSgi BHFpJP2ii7gz076mRiBb+KwCo+1xKUYNpsJk1m7HND7PjqkXps+JHiNaWdr9vAxx raFO =L1oX -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...
Avoiding willfull infringement no longer requires paying off a patent attorney to get a freedom to operate review. This isn't to say that reading patents is always productive That case raised the bar a bit, but the core problem remains - if you learn about a patent you definitely violate (and there is very likely to be at least one and possibly many), via whatever means, then by continuing business you become a wilful violator. Which makes sense: how could it be any other way? It still never makes sense to read patents. You can only lose. -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 5:09 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Most companies (Google certainly included) have therefore banned their staff from reading patents, Bitcoin is not Google though, and applying the same patent protocols to Bitcoin as in Google is drawing a false equivalence between the two. Google can survive single or triple damages, so it makes sense to hope that of those patents you necessarily violate due to the size of your operations, they attract only single damages. Google has so many fingers in so many pies that violating some patents is a question of when, not if. Bitcoin has a far narrower scope than trying to take over the world (and moon). Happy reading: http://endsoftpatents.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents/ TL;DR: If even single damages result in commercial death, you better pay attention to patents, to reduce the chances of accidentally running into one. (But Bitcoin is not ccache either - it's all about money and it isn't inconceivable that a patent infringement suit might not result in commercial death. The right answer here isn't as obvious as you make it out to be.) -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
