On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 8:09 AM, Mike Hearn <m...@plan99.net> wrote: > The first rule of patents is you do not go looking for patents. US law is > written in a really stupid way, such that if you knowingly infringe, damages > triple. Because America uses the patent office as a revenue source,
You have received outdated advice on this point. In Re Seagate (http://patentlyo.com/patent/2007/08/in-re-seagate-t.html) this precident was over-turned (and has subsequently been upheld in other cases). Avoiding willfull infringement no longer requires paying off a patent attorney to get a freedom to operate review. This isn't to say that reading patents is always productive now: They're often nearly inscrutable (especially to people without substantial patent reading experience), and you may discover potential infringement that creates more work for you to sort out (especially since people without patent experience tend to read patents much more broadly than they actually are). There are other defensive approaches which are interesting than hoping to use patents as a counter attack: For one— filing a patent gets the work entered in the only database that USPTO examiners are _guaranteed_ to consult when doing a prior art search, so it may have a fighting chance of precluding someone else patenting the same material later (they may also search the internet and use other resources, but they're guaranteed to consult the existing patents and applications). Patents can also be used defensively as leverage in a licensing negotiation: Without your own patents you don't get invited to the negotiating table at all with someone else who may hold patents in a space that you're working on. These are somewhat thin advantages so great care is required to make sure that things are setup so that badness cannot happen later when inevitable changes of ownership happen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free." http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
