Re: Negotiating for using Royalty Free patents

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

jamie wrote:

> That only applies to developers in the US. The rest of us can
> deliberately violate as many software patents as we like without
> breaking the law (AFAIK software patents can only be legally enforced in
> US and Japan). Might be worth only copyrighting code to non-US citizens
> on suspect projects just to be on the safe side.
>  
Remember that it isn't just the copyright holders that this will cause a 
problem for.  Anyone who distributes the patented code you wrote could 
be liable for infringement.

Given that our CVS server is located in the US (hosted by a US owned 
company) and most of our main distributors are also US entities, 
knowingly infringing patents is going to cause problems for Gnome no 
matter where you live.

While we can't know whether a particular bit of code is covered by a 
patent, we shouldn't go adding code that we know does infringe (which 
would result in triple damages if it got brought to court).

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/