On Fri, 19 Feb 2016 05:29:20 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: > On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 23:42:11 UTC, Chris Wright wrote: >> There are damages for patent infringement. There are higher damages for >> willful infringement. > > Iff you use it as a means for production. There is nothing illegal about > implementing patented techniques in source code (i.e. describing them) > and distributing it.
That depends on where the patent was filed and where the lawsuit is being executed. >> regarding GCC. And thanks to how software patents generally are, it'd >> probably be regarding something that most C/C++ compilers need to >> implement and the most obvious implementation for that feature. > > If that is the case then there will be prior art that predates the > patent. Not if it's for a feature added to a C++ standard after the patent was filed. Not if it's for a feature that modern compilers consider standard but wasn't standard before the patent was created. Not if it's in a jurisdiction that uses first-to-file rather than first-to-invent.