Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub [LWN.net]

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 12:05 UTC (Wed) by copsewood (subscriber, #199)
In reply to: Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub by khim
Parent article: Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

There are plenty of places outside the US other than China which have more sensible patent laws. A server hosting company is one of the last kinds of operation which can relocate or go anonymous on Tor due to bandwidth and latency issues, so a much more probable solution if Rackspace don't want to fight the lawsuit is for Github to be hosted in Europe by a hosting company with no US office.

There have been some crazy and highly offensive extraterritoriality in the reach of US law recently, but I really don't see the US cutting connections to those who don't respect US patents in the same manner as has more reasonably occurred in respect of online gambling sites, and if they do that in respect of ignored patents then people outside the US will increasingly ignore the US market as irrelevant to our interests.

Frankly looking at it from this side of the pond, the only relevant question here is how much unemployment and lost business the US wants before the US population force their representatives to clean up patent law as affects software.

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Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 22:34 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

There are plenty of places outside the US other than China which have more sensible patent laws.

"Sensible patent laws" is just one ingredient. Another one is "large domestic market". Thus China is the primary candidate: other countries are just not big enough.

Why is it important to have large domestic market? Easy: in this case you can develop all the patent-encumbered technologies you want without thinking about patents at all till you are big enough and is ready to go and kill your US competitors. Otherwise US trolls just squeeze your customers instead of you.