I know you don’t want to comment on specifics of recent US law news but what might be useful to the community is a discussion on what patent law really says. There is a disconnect (often emotional) between the true nature of such laws and the laypersons understanding. I for one would like to know why patent law isn’t more like trademark law where one has to actively defend a trademark or risk losing it. Obviousness of a method is hard to prove over the lifespan of a patent. As time goes on and more people start accepting a certain method as being commonplace (and hence obvious to those concerned) does that factor at all into the law? What is the metric for obviousness?
The reason I have to ask here is there really are few resources a person has access to to research these issues without going to law school – something I personally have considered and then rejected at this point in life. This is not a desire to create some sort of grass roots campaign against cases in the court system. I’ll leave the lawyering to the lawyers. This is more of a hacker’s desire to understand the rules that govern the world around him. So far, where the law is concerned, it seems an unobtainable goal for your average Joe citizen.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
The first time, I thought it was a typo.
The second time, I asked myself if you’ve been saying “obious” your whole life.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=obvious
Comment by mr. obious — October 13, 2007 @ 2:55 pm
Dude! Don’t type so fast!
Comment by fraggle — October 13, 2007 @ 3:32 pm
s/lawyer like people/lawyer-like people/
s/obious/obvious/
s/obiousness/obviousness/
s/pattent/patent/
s/is little resources/are few resources/
s/descussion/discussion/
s/activily/actively/
Comment by jpl — October 13, 2007 @ 5:06 pm
It looks like the only lawyer-like people who ware going to reply are language lawyers.
That’s a bit of a shame, because you bring up a good point in your post that trademarks have to be defended by the trademark owners and in contrast everyone but patent owners have to defend themselves against patents.
Too many OCD, pedantic types out there I guess.
Comment by Ray — October 13, 2007 @ 5:45 pm
Typos fixed.
Comment by J5 — October 13, 2007 @ 7:00 pm
Yesterday I was very lucky to attend the SFLC’s Legal Summit for Software Freedom [http://www.softwarefreedom.org/summit/] in New York.
At the conference a nice pamphlet named “A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects” (Version 1.0) was distributed to particiants.
If I understood correctly this work will be made available on SFLC’s website [http://www.softwarefreedom.org] soon. That document is exactly what you are looking for. Keep an eye on their website.
Comment by simo — October 13, 2007 @ 8:21 pm
“This is more of a hacker’s desire to understand the rules that govern the world around him”
What I think would be really helpful here is if someone, a lawyer type, put together a guide of what to do and what not to do, a sort of open source hackers guide to the laws that can screw us up.
Comment by Karl Lattimer — October 14, 2007 @ 5:02 am