IANAL; this is not legal advice.
The 'one year' you are referring to is from 'disclosure', not from released
product. "disclosure" in this case is a legal term-of-art. Further, there
is a difference between US and European Union patent law, in that, IIRC, EU
law requires patent application before _public_ disclosure. In effect,
"disclosure" means revealing the idea to anyone, inside your organization or
out, but there are all sorts of corner cases in the law.
Nolo Press had a good book that discusses copyright and patent law, although
they may not have had the chance to update it to reflect recent changes.
In any event, if you are serious about either getting or trying to overturn
a patent, you need to see a lawyer specializing in patent law, because case
law frequently changes the nuances in this area.
-----Original Message-----
From: jesse [mailto:jesse@wirex.com]
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2000 10:53 AM
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Tux 2 patents
On Fri, Oct 06, 2000 at 09:13:25AM +0200, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > Once you use the technique and it's documented as clear by a patent
> > lawyer, it will be safe for you to use forever, particularly if it's
> > in the public domain. This is winning....
>
> This is good to know, but what I was talking about is taking it *out of
> the closed source* domain. The idea is to take our best ideas out of
> the closed source domain. After a few years of doing that, it's my
> guess that the evil software patent system would keel over and die.
IANAL, but I believe that once you've implemented a method in a released
product, you have only one year to file the patents for it. If you don't
file patents for it within this time period, it becomes public domain. I
think it would be possible to invalidate their patents, but I don't think
it would be possible to get your own patent on it after the fact and refuse
to let them use it.
-Jesse
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