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
