Will patents pillage open source? (News.com)

[Posted April 16, 2003 by corbet]

Here's a News.com column saying that the patent threat to free software has been overstated. "Intellectual-property litigation is very expensive. As a practical matter, therefore, the ability to enforce intellectual-property requires a relatively small number of infringers that dominate the market, and which have resources justifying the legal effort. But open-source users are a huge and widely diverse lot who can always resort to home-grown alternatives."

Will patents pillage open source? (News.com)

Posted Apr 16, 2003 17:02 UTC (Wed) by strombrg (subscriber, #2178) [Link] (1 responses)

The infringers don't have to have deep pockets to be worth going after in court. They just have to be cutting into the patent-holders profits a lot - which opensource can easily do.

It's not just a matter of getting money from the infringer. They can bar the infringer from using the unlicensed technology.

Will patents pillage open source? (News.com)

Posted Apr 16, 2003 17:14 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

> The infringers don't have to have deep pockets to be worth going after in court

I agree. I think the danger to the free software community is that we
won't be allowed to develope competing pieces of software. i.e. it's not
court cases we should fear, it's just the existence of the patents/laws.

Ciaran O'Riordan

Will patents pillage open source? (News.com)

Posted Apr 17, 2003 8:02 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

Patents can also be used for extortion. Invalidating patent claim in a court is very expensive and time consuming. This will be problem for small companies and individuals who don't have money to hire patent lawyers or time to investigate patent claims, so they can only buckle under this kind of thing (assuming "patent licence" is priced "reasonably").

In Europe patents in general go through more through approval process than in USA, so getting "extortion" patents for "patent mobs" :))) is harder.

(The Tivo vs. that other Linux VCR maker patents are also a good to keep in mind, it's only patent lawyers who profit from patents (+ large international companies with large patent portfolios).)