On Fri, Oct 06, 2000 at 09:13:25AM +0200, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > Once you use the technique and it's documented as clear by a patent
> > lawyer, it will be safe for you to use forever, particularly if it's
> > in the public domain. This is winning....
>
> This is good to know, but what I was talking about is taking it *out of
> the closed source* domain. The idea is to take our best ideas out of
> the closed source domain. After a few years of doing that, it's my
> guess that the evil software patent system would keel over and die.
IANAL, but I believe that once you've implemented a method in a released
product, you have only one year to file the patents for it. If you don't
file patents for it within this time period, it becomes public domain. I
think it would be possible to invalidate their patents, but I don't think
it would be possible to get your own patent on it after the fact and refuse
to let them use it.
-Jesse
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