This is video and transcript of a talk by Andrew Tridgell on how to defend yourself against Patent Infringement claims.
I'm one of those people who believes software patents are a horrible idea, and that the patent system in general is a travesty. If you are serious about selling your own software, you owe it to yourself to investigate this issue a little bit. If you start to make real money, *someone* will try to sue you for patent infringement, if only to try to pressure you into buying them off.
from http://www.osnews.com/
I'm one of those people who believes software patents are a horrible idea, and that the patent system in general is a travesty. If you are serious about selling your own software, you owe it to yourself to investigate this issue a little bit. If you start to make real money, *someone* will try to sue you for patent infringement, if only to try to pressure you into buying them off.
Quote
Andrew Tridgell: Okay. So, I’m going to be talking today about patent defence for free software developers, and, as it says on the slide there, I am not a lawyer, but, the point of this talk is not to have a talk by a lawyer. The point is to learn about how an engineer interacts with patent attorneys, to teach you the basics of language and the day-to-day you do when you try to communicate with patent attorneys in building patent defence. So that’s the first part of this talk. The first part is a bit like a tutorial how an engineer interacts with patent attorneys to do analysis of patents.
The second part of it is a discussion on how the free software community can lower its exposure to patent attacks. This is something I’m quite passionate about, I am concerned that patent attacks on the free software community are going to become more common in the future, and I believe there are things that we can do as a community, as developers within the community, to lower our exposure to those attacks. That’s the aim of the second part of the talk..
from http://www.osnews.com/
