On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 7:41 AM, Ray Lai <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm not a lawyer, I don't know what the laws are for distributing patented > code, source or binary, paid CD-ROM or free FTP.
In my experience, you should be able to count on lots of people - both outside the legal profession, and inside - to make up all sorts of crud about those laws. But I expect that none of that really matters, because it also seems like you can count on different courts saying different things (if they are willing to say anything at all), based on their ideas of what reasonable behavior looks like (and their own extensive knowledge of laws and history that no one else knows about). (But, also, I'm not sure that much of anything in the computer industry is based on reasonable behavior.) That said... Most patents are worthless if you are willing to put in the effort to research them. I've been through a number of patent proceedings, and I can at least tell you a bit about the USA patent mechanisms: Patents are essentially a set of claims. Patent law is based on a "guilty until proven innocent" philosophy which means it sort of does not matter what they say - if someone says you are guilty of violating them, you are technically in violation at that point in time. But if you can show that all of the claims on a patent are either (a) so narrow that they do not apply to you, or (b) so broad that they apply to things which existed before the patent was filed, then you become innocent of violating that patent. But you have no way of knowing what patents have been filed, because there are too many of them to understand, and because no one really cares. But in practice: [a] the wording of patent claims is so ambiguous that you can almost always show that you are innocent of violating any patent claims, and [b] the process of proving your innocence is so expensive that almost no one actually cares about the patent process. I have read that it costs on the order of $12 million to deal with a patent court case, and people with that kind of money don't have the time to understand the relevant technology - so they delegate the details to people they can get along with.... Anyways, it's a mess and almost always a bad investment. But for the few people with more than enough money to fund this kind of thing, it's also something they might be doing just on general principles or because someone asked them to be doing that. The net effect is that what patents say doesn't really matter all that much. If someone threatens you with a patent lawsuit you can be almost guaranteed that they have almost no idea what you are doing, and that they will loudly assert that you are wrong. If this happens to you, you should spend some time in a library (the kind that has books, not a computer based transient phenomena) and sit down and find prior art (typically from previous centuries) for each of the the things you are doing which correspond to claims of the patents you are supposedly "violating". You should expect this to take days, or weeks - don't give up prematurely. Or, if you don't care that much about what you are doing, you should have been doing something different in the first place. And if you want to protect yourself against patents, spending some time, effort and/or money to make sure that your local library has good reference and historical works is probably the best way to go. At least, if you are concerned about USA patents. I have no background nor experience with other jurisdictions. I hope this helps. Have a nice day. -- Raul
