From: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net>
To: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace•org>
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...
Date: Mon, 19 May 2014 17:09:07 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANEZrP3sDh3Q9T0xFi7maNQR9Z6R7gQ6vT5kjchcMkD0hMHOdw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20140519144709.GA29574@netbook.cypherspace.org>
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2214 bytes --]
IMO this list is fine for discussing such topics.
Here are some thoughts. I had to deal with patents at Google (my name is on
a few, not my choice unfortunately). Many aspects of patent law are deeply
unintuitive, so here's the crash course as I was given it.
The first rule of patents is *you do not go looking for patents*. US law is
written in a really stupid way, such that if you knowingly infringe,
damages triple. Because America uses the patent office as a revenue source,
basically everything you can possibly imagine is covered by some ridiculous
patent so if you go looking you will always find applicable patents on
every idea and then you end up potentially much worse off.
Most companies (Google certainly included) have therefore banned their
staff from reading patents, thus ensuring that the whole point of them, the
sharing of knowledge, doesn't actually function! And it's much better I
think if we follow the same policy. So *please do not ever mention that
suchandsuch is patented on this list*! When it comes to patent law,
ignorance is bliss. Patents are written in a heavily obfuscated manner such
that actually trying to learn from them is hard work anyway.
One reason I wrote up the contracts stuff when I did is to get it out there
into the public domain, so people couldn't patent the basics of the Bitcoin
protocol. It'll be much better for everyone if new ideas are just put right
out into the public domain. *Please do not patent Bitcoin related research
you do*, even if you think it's for the best:
1) Defensive patenting doesn't work. The whole idea was mutually assured
destruction, you hit me I'll hit you type of logic, but the prevalence of
shell/troll companies killed off that idea. Plus it turns out that big
companies are quite willing to sue each other into oblivion anyway. Once a
patent exists, it'll be used as a weapon by someone eventually, and
attempting to "fight back" is probably not a workable strategy. Far better
to ensure the material is simply unpatentable by anyone.
2) Patenting with the intention to sue people using Bitcoin in the same
way: well, if you plan to do this, there's not much to talk about .... you
won't make any friends this way.
[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2559 bytes --]
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-05-19 15:09 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 29+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-05-17 15:31 [Bitcoin-development] Paper Currency Jerry Felix
2014-05-17 15:45 ` Matt Whitlock
2014-05-17 16:07 ` Chris Pacia
2014-05-17 16:40 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-05-18 11:47 ` Alex Kotenko
2014-05-18 12:14 ` Andreas Schildbach
2014-05-18 12:51 ` Alex Kotenko
2014-05-19 13:06 ` Brooks Boyd
2014-05-19 13:50 ` Alex Kotenko
2014-05-18 13:50 ` Natanael
2014-05-18 18:47 ` Alex Kotenko
2014-05-18 20:10 ` Natanael
2014-05-19 10:26 ` Alex Kotenko
2014-05-19 12:55 ` Sergio Lerner
2014-05-19 13:34 ` Martin Sip
2014-05-19 13:53 ` Alex Kotenko
2014-05-19 14:47 ` [Bitcoin-development] patents Adam Back
2014-05-19 15:09 ` Mike Hearn [this message]
2014-05-19 18:27 ` Peter Todd
2014-05-19 18:40 ` Mike Hearn
2014-05-19 18:43 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-05-19 18:46 ` Peter Todd
2014-05-19 18:49 ` Mike Hearn
2014-05-19 22:15 ` Bernd Jendrissek
2014-05-20 10:30 ` Jeff Garzik
2014-05-18 13:50 ` [Bitcoin-development] Paper Currency Andreas Schildbach
2014-05-19 12:21 ` Mike Hearn
2014-05-19 18:20 ` Justus Ranvier
2014-05-19 18:39 ` Peter Todd
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=CANEZrP3sDh3Q9T0xFi7maNQR9Z6R7gQ6vT5kjchcMkD0hMHOdw@mail.gmail.com \
--to=mike@plan99$(echo .)net \
--cc=adam@cypherspace$(echo .)org \
--cc=bitcoin-development@lists$(echo .)sourceforge.net \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox