> I assure you if I walked into the lawyer's offices over at Google, Yahoo, > Adobe, Microsoft, or pretty much any major Silicon Valley company and > informed them that people were discussing and posting patents on it, this > distribution list would *lose* every single one of those people as a > contributor or subscriber to this list.
That may be the practice in those places, but doesn't make it any less absurd. This is information that's publicly available to anyone with a web browser in multiple different ways that are untraceable unless you're under surveillance. How on earth can anyone prove that a person did NOT access such public info? If you recuse yourself from every venue that can conceivably address patents then I've got a cave for you just north of Kabul. Just because you played ostrich on a mailing list does not mean you didn't access it via multiple other ways. Presumption of guilt doesn't require that you prove a negative. You think those lawyers are going to bar you from accessing the Internet at all? Just a few years ago the same lawyers would laugh at anyone who even suggested that corporate employees could blog publicly. Thousands of companies gave up that practice in a hurry. Sure lawyers will tell you anything that causes them to do the least amount of work. I'm very familiar with a highly regulated industry and every time I design a B2B or B2C app, the lawyers first put up all the barriers they can think of because...well, just because. Mostly because they don't need to think through and solve problems, if they are not forced to. -- Kontra http://counternotions.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
