On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 8:02 AM, Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+la@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Paul Davis wrote: > >> please do not post patent abstracts to this or any other mailing list. >> US law poses no requirement on an "inventor" to perform a patent >> search, and a provable lack of awareness of existing patents does have >> a small but definite impact on the legal result of an infringement. > > This is in direct contradiction to the advice Andrew Tridgell (one > of the lead Samba developers): > > http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents/ Tridgell's argument is that a project is going to get killed by a patent infringement anyway, so you may as well figure out what's out there to be as best prepared as possible. I don't think he's wrong - rather, there are different ways to tackle the issue. In the case of the (absurd) apple patent that was cited, I have to believe that any infringment case based on that patent is going to turn out better for FOSS if there is a robust independent discovery basis. If it turns out that lots of people have read the patent and tried to workaround it and failed, I cannot see how that would help an attempt to overturn it. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
