On 7/16/05, Arnoud Engelfriet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thomson's answer wasn't particularly surprising, since European > patent law already contains an exemption for personal use of > patented technology. Besides, there's no money to be gained from > sueing individuals that use a patented technology privately.
Can you point me to that statute? Is it a "hobbyist, design it yourself, infringe unknowingly" sort of thing, and if not, where is the dividing line between a precise description of the ideas contained in a patent and one that is so precise that it happens to be an executable implementation? > I don't see where you got the "distributors" from, since the > note only speaks of "personal use". At least in US copyright law as I understand it (which borrowed the term from patent law), "contributory infringement" can't be found where there is no direct infringement to be contributed to, nor even where there are substantial non-infringing uses of the product and the distributor makes a good-faith attempt to discourage, and avoid deriving substantial revenues from, infringing uses. It strikes me that personal use of, say, a Debian package of LAME would almost certainly dominate commercial use, and that Debian could with a bit of care avoid both the fact and the appearance of deriving substantial benefit from infringing uses. If Thomson were effectively estopped from arguing that personal use was unlicensed and infringing (which would presumably take a bit more official statement on their part, but not that much more official), then Debian and its derivatives would effectively have their blessing to distribute open-source MP3 encoders -- as long as we communicate clearly to their recipients that we do not convey any patent rights to them and they are protected patent-wise by nothing other than an estoppel theory with limited scope. Whether all this is DFSG-free is of course a whole 'nother question, but it's always interesting to know what really is and isn't on offer from a rights holder. If you think about it, a text editor can also be used to do things that violate a third party's IP rights of one kind or another; but that doesn't make text editors non-DFSG-free. Bit of a stretch, I know -- but how about BitTorrent clients, given what seems to be the numerically dominant traffic over that protocol? (Numerical dominance alone doesn't prove anything; IIRC Sony's own study of usage habits in the original VCR case suggested that only 20% of end user VCR usage was non-copyright-infringing.) Cheers, - Michael (IANAL, TINLA)
