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Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threatNovell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threatPosted Nov 22, 2006 10:37 UTC (Wed) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)In reply to: Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat by jiri.hlusi Parent article: Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat
I'm not quite an expert in [any] law matters, but isn't it so that in order to cause patent infingement, author [of a software] must also be making profit on the work created (among other conditions)? No. Microsoft was sued over Internet Explorer and lost (and had to pay a considerable sum of money), even though MS had never sold IE. I mean, plain writing a software as an act of creativity can hardly be pu[n]ished under any law, correct? No, plain creativity can be illegal. It's even illegal if I write the software for my own use and never distribute it. This is one reason why software patents are so stupid -- they are essentially a type of "thought crime". Rich.
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Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 23, 2006 1:59 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] No, plain creativity can be illegal. It's even illegal if I write the software for my own use and never distribute it. This is one reason why software patents are so stupid -- they are essentially a type of "thought crime". That's really overstating it. The thought doesn't infringe. The creativity doesn't. You can invent something someone else did and not go to jail or owe anyone anything. You just can't use it. And that's obviously required by practicality. There's no way to tell if someone got an idea from a publication by someone else or dreamed it up himself. So if an inventor is going to get paid at all for disclosing his invention, the law has to assume that anyone who uses an invention after it was disclosed got it via the disclosure. (That doesn't seem to explain why it's an infringement if you independently invent something after the patentee invented it but before the patentee disclosed it, though. I don't know what the rationale for that is).
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