End Software Patents has up a transcript and link to video of Andrew Tridgell’s talk on patent defense.
Interestingly, Mr. Tridgell asserts that you should be reading patents – contrary to a lot of folk wisdom that doing so is dangerous because of “triple damages”:
Andrew Tridgell: Triple damages. Right. Okay. In the free software community, imagine you have a little project, say, ccache, my little compiler caching project. If you’ve got one lot of damages for patent infringement, what would happen to the project? It’s dead. If it gets three lots of damages for patent infringement, what happens to the project? It’s still dead. For most free software projects -not all there’s some that have the resources and could sustain a patent infringement damages type case- the vast majority of projects in your average distro, one death is enough.
So in that case, do you walk blindly across the minefield in the hope that the blindfold will protect you from the shrapnel, or do you actually take it off and have a look and step around the mines? I propose that for most FOSS projects, stepping around the mines is the right way to go. Not all companies agree, and this doesn’t apply to all projects. Some of the larger projects, some of the projects with more corporate relationships, this may not be applicable to.
Mr. Tridgell goes on to explain how to deal with patents and the various levels of defense from a patent attack, summing up with the hope of a strong community-based defense:
If we go after the free software community, they’re going to advertise the workaround, we might lose our entire value of this patent. We might lose the lot. And it’s expensive, getting patents, expensive maintaining them. So they don’t want to lose them. That’s where I want us to be as a community. I want us to jump on patents, squash them, find workarounds – but rigourously, not the Slashdot way of the title and “Apple did it in 1915″ or whatever. Not that sort of thing. It’s the type of serious analysis that I’ve tried to show you how to do today. I’m sure that nearly everyone in this room is quite capable of doing this analysis. You’re the type of engineers that can do it. You just need to be lead a little bit along the way, to start building up your knowledge of how to analyse patents.
The problem is that we’re hamstrung by privilege. This is something that I haven’t worked out how to solve. Companies don’t like their employees talking to other employees about patents. For good reasons. We need to find a forum where we can communicate without causing all the lawyers to have heart attacks, so that we can take advantage of our collective engineering knowledge to make ourselves a tough target. If we can do that, we will be the meanest, badest guys on the block when it comes to patent defence, and nobody’s going to be able to take us on.
Well worth reading, especially in light of increasing patent-based FUD attacks against Linux from Microsoft and the doom-and-gloom appeasement arguments and anti-community actions from Microsoft lackeys.
Recent Comments