Gabe Wachob wrote: > Actually, the language was changed from "post to a > list", not "subscribe to a list" for this very reason.
It appears to me that your intent is, or should be, to protect against patent trolls, who are likely to retroactively patent the OpenID standard now that it is being widely adopted. In the US, you can file a patent in which you *claim* you invented stuff one year prior to the patent application. So the technology is first proposed and described on this list, on 2006 December 7, 2006. It is incorporated into the standard and comes to be widely used around about, say, 2007 August. On 2007 December 5, 2007, the patent troll has a friendly individual inventor file an patent application claiming to have invented the technology on 2007, december 6. They keep the patent under water for a couple of years, preventing it from being published, until evil unpopular giant megacorp, say intel, has been using the technology for some time. They then surface the patent. Should intel fail to settle, they have inventor tell the jury he is being oppressed by evil giant megacorp. Jury awards the patent troll a zillion dollars, and cabillion on top of that. Unfortunately, your proposed measure is of limited effectiveness, since the our friend the highly jury sympathetic inventor is probably not signed up on this list, his expertise being primarily in being loved by juries, rather than computer technology. Indeed, no measures whatsoever are likely to be very effective. The patent office wants people to take out more patents, just as Ford wants people to buy more Fords. The judiciary similarly wants more human activity to be subject to patents, just as they want more laws, and those laws of broader scope, hence the steady shrinkage of any portion of the constitution that begins "congress shall make no law ..." _______________________________________________ specs mailing list specs@openid.net http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/specs
