Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> All I'm trying to tell Pavel is not to be so blatant about making
> statements on the list about taking prople's patents. How would Bob
> Young feel if he spent $$$$$ on securing patents only to discover
> folks telling him "HA HA HA try and get us, patent holder". It sends
> a bad message, and leaves a trail of court exhibits in the mailing
> list if one of these companies ever wanted to get agressive with us,
> that's all I'm saying.
Exhibit #1: We believe our modems already come with implied permission
to use them! We're simply using modems to do what the modem's box says
the modem can do...
Exhibit #2: What patents? My modem doesn't come with a list of patent
numbers. It's impossible for us to make an *explicit* attempt to avoid
infringing these hypothetical patents since none of us has any idea
which patents to avoid... For all I know, their existence is an urban myth.
Not even the ITU provides the necessary information. Not one patent is
cited in the ITU-T standards (though there is a general warning that
implementors "may" need to be wary in some countries). Nobody can deny
our "best effort" at implementing a modem is simply to follow the ITU-T
*international* standards, inventing our own algorithms in the process.
(The standards don't describe much in the way of algorithms).
You know, there's a fair chance that given our independent inventions,
we'll come up with methods outside the scope of existing patents anyway.
And that's Exhibit #3: We're simply implementing documented
international standards, using our own invented techniques to fill in
the holes left unspecified by the standards. (And there are a lot of
those holes).
We don't want to tread on existing patents and we'd happily avoid
sensitive areas if we knew which ones to avoid.
If that turns out to be as broad as "avoid anything above 14k in the US
and Japan" then the appropriate action is to not distribute the software
in the US and Japen, or to disable all features above 14k for US and
Japan distributions -- plus a warning for those who decide to import the
software themselves. But so far, the need for this hasn't been confirmed.
> The Judge in our case ruled the search was proper and refused to allow
> us to collect the bond, even though NOT ONE LINE OF NOVELL SOURCE CODE
> OR DOCUMENTS WERE FOUND IN OUR POSSESSION.
Harsh. You just pointed out that these things happen despite total
innocence. (That's us :-) Nothing we can do, except keep quiet and hope
nobody notices.
-- Jamie
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jul 07 2000 - 21:00:17 EST