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Re: Patents (Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!)

2004-10-05 10:04:54
Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no>:
If it was possible to set up things in such a way that it was easy for a 
company to declare "no first use" on a patent in the space of standards 
implementation, and very disruptive for a company to renege on such a 
promise (for instance, by having all the "no first use" promises by other 
companies being rendered inoperative), we might get something..... but this 
is just me thinking aloud. I have not been able to get any patent lawyers 
interested in pursuing/spearheading this train of thought.

In fact, Larry's "go on the offense" proposal appears to be derived from a 
patent-termination-clause concept I invented four years ago, which he later
wrote into the 1.0 versions of AFL and OSL.

It didn't work.  None of the legal departments at IBM or the other 
Fortune-100 corporations with the biggest stake in open source were
willing to go first in sacrificing the "advantage" of being able to 
play multi-billion dollar games of chicken with their portfolios.

So I *have* been able to get patent lawyers interested in 
pursuing/spearheading this train of thought.  And it dead-ended.

Thus, in part, my belief that IETF and W3C and other standards 
organizations must lead on this issue or become irrelevant.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

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