--- Day changed Wed Aug 09 2017
00:33 < midnightmagic> where's that jerk who claimed he was an optimizing god anyway
00:35 < gmaxwell> did you see his reddit posts  he's still been going on..
00:39 < midnightmagic> smh     
00:41 < midnightmagic> I didn't yet.
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16:04 < ofek> hey gmaxwell
16:04 < ofek> gmaxwell, can you please tell me a bit more about https://github.com/ofek/coincurve/issues/6 ?
16:05 < ofek> who owns these patents?
16:05 < ofek> I'm not at all versed in IP law
16:07 < ofek> is there a legal way to ship with the optimization?
16:08 < sipa> ofek: ask a lawyer
16:11 < ofek> sipa, I mean, if you guys wrote it, do you recall where you read about it? what patent?
16:14 < gmaxwell> ofek: I strongly advise against it.
16:15 < gmaxwell> It's just bringing down risk on yourself and users of your software in exchange for a fairly modest performance improvement which will probably be completely overshadowed by the inefficiency of the surrounding python calling code.
16:16 < ofek> gmaxwell, ok ty. is it only infringing to ship with it? since it's part of your code base and all
16:19 < gmaxwell> ofek: it's disabled in our codebase.
16:19 < gmaxwell> We don't believe it's problematic in that state.
16:19 < ofek> so, instead of me shipping a compiled lib, would users building from source be infringing?
16:20 < gmaxwell> (e.g. we think that it's like publishing an academic paper on the technique; -- something that a patent can never touch, which is protected by the precidence of the first amendment in the US)-- and which we need to do to even have any idea what performance impact the thing has.)
16:21 < gmaxwell> ofek: A user could potentially infringe by going and changing things to turn it on, but thats always the case... e.g. even if there weren't any implementation of it all the user could modify the source to add it.
16:22 < ofek> god I instantly hate patents
16:22 < midnightmagic> Software patents in general are a blight, yea.
16:26 < gmaxwell> The patent expires in not so long, so thats why we prefer to not use it rather than try to invalidate the patent.
16:27 < midnightmagic> I'll guess by the time the expiration hits is about how long a lazy stroll through litigation might take. For questionable gain. Makes sense. At least we can look forward to it at some point in the future.
16:30 < gmaxwell> the patent of concern expires sometime in 2018 or 2019 IIRC (exact expiration dates are actually difficult to determine, because the patent office grants small extensions depending on how long the processing took)
16:33 < ofek> ok, so next version I'm removing optimization. what should I say? be explicit or not draw attention?
16:33 < midnightmagic> :-o     
16:34  * midnightmagic backs slowly away
16:36 < gmaxwell> It's not a secret, but I wouldn't bother making a big deal about it. I've found that if you mention you're doing something to avoid patents it will sometimes bring out trolls who are just angry about patents in general.
17:33 < TD-Linux> yeah, you'll bring people out of the woodwork who will argue erroneously that the patents don't apply in their favorite country. but it's usually not too much of an issue because you can just say "no"
18:57 < ofek> gmaxwell, out of curiosity, how did you find out about coincurve?
20:28 < gmaxwell> ofek: saw the PR to joinmarket.
20:28 < ofek> gmaxwell, ah ok
20:28 < ofek> gmaxwell, fixed btw https://github.com/ofek/coincurve#600
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