Who?
- Richard Fontana
- Bradley M. Kuhn
- Eben Moglen
- Matthew Norwood
- Daniel B. Ravicher
- Karen Sandler
- James Vasile
- Aaron Williamson
What?
FOSS Primer - A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects(Chapter 4)
Where?
When?
4 June 2008
The Gist
Chapter of the Foss Primer that I blogged about earlier, helping people interested in FOSS familiarize themselves with what patents are, how patents can be used to harm FOSS projects, and what contributors accused of patent infringement can do to defend themselves.
The Good
- Learned a lot about patents, what they are, how they are composed, what they do.
- Teaches people to defend against patents through - License, Non-infringement, Invalidity, and unenforceability
- Gets right down to how to read a patent, what parts to look at first, and what parts to use for backup information.
The Bad
- Tries to make patents not look scary, but still makes it seem difficult to take any steps to ensure prevention from patent infringement.
- Pretty heavy document on the legal side
- Everything is dependent on the situation, information is not specific to any single case.
Questions
- What is the simplest way to just avoid patent infringement through prevention.
- If I feel I am likely to infringe upon a patent, can I go about requesting a license? How?
- What are some examples of big patent cases in the FOSS world?
My Review
I thought this read was extra informative because I knew virtually nothing about patents prior to reading this chapter. It was not written too difficultly and I really liked how it gets right to the point explaining which parts of the patent to not worry about, and mentioning that the claims are the most important part.
9/10
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