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From: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd•org>
To: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net>, Adam Back <adam@cypherspace•org>
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] patents...
Date: Mon, 19 May 2014 20:27:08 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <c4d00173-a233-4f55-988a-ad2ba771d457@email.android.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CANEZrP3sDh3Q9T0xFi7maNQR9Z6R7gQ6vT5kjchcMkD0hMHOdw@mail.gmail.com>

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On 19 May 2014 17:09:07 CEST, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net> wrote:

>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.

Meh. The world is much bigger than the USA. Secondly that rule makes it difficult to educate people about why patents are as bad as they are.

Feel free to continue censoring your own discussion within closed corporate environments. But to say keeping patent discussion off mailing lists is appropriate or wise when the tech news is full of such discussion is silly.
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  reply	other threads:[~2014-05-19 18:27 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
2014-05-19 18:27             ` Peter Todd [this message]
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

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