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

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 May 2014 20:27:08 +0200

On 19 May 2014 17:09:07 CEST, Mike Hearn <[email-masked]> 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.