Re: Mailing List Patent Policy (was: Apple Patent Application: Mobile Banking Concept)

On 01/31/2013 02:22 PM, Kumar McMillan wrote:
>> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/apple-patents-crowdsourced-peer-to-peer-mobile-banking-that-could-use-itunes-to-provide-cash-on-demand/
>> Can you believe this?
> 
> As sad and depressing as this sounds, you shouldn't ever post patent
>  announcements to an email list that might be associated with an 
> emerging protocol (such as what this w3c group aims for). Some info 
> on why:
> 
> http://www.radwin.org/michael/2003/02/28/why_discussing_patents_over_email_is_bad/
>
> I've done it before myself :(

Having authored several patents by myself and having one of them granted
before deciding that I never wanted to do that ever again, I have mixed
feelings about this.

Our (Digital Bazaar's) official company policy is that we don't e-mail
around patents, no matter how ridiculous, they're always discussed in a
channel that isn't logged.

I also fear that the "head-in-the-sand" approach will hobble this group.
We need to know about the patents that exist if we are to work around
them for the Royalty-Free requirement of all W3C specs. The risk we run
by doing that, however, is that large companies (like Yahoo, Google,
Mozilla, etc.) might stay away from this work for that very reason. We
don't want to risk that either.

So, let's try this as a compromise. If you see a patent that is of
interest, it is up to you if you want to notify any of the editors or
mailing list participants OVER A NON-RECORDABLE MEDIUM. Just to be
clear: Twitter, G+, Skype, IRC, are all recordable mediums. A phone call
is best.

Folks are free to ignore this advice on the mailing list, but know that
by doing so, you're going to push some of the companies that are afraid
of these sorts of damages away from participating in this group (and we
really, really don't want to do that).

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Aaron Swartz, PaySwarm, and Academic Journals
http://manu.sporny.org/2013/payswarm-journals/

Received on Thursday, 31 January 2013 20:13:06 UTC