Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...

From: Mike Hearn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 May 2014 17:09:07 +0200

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.