- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:04:27 +0300
- To: Chris Wilson <Chris.Wilson@microsoft.com>
- Cc: "Dailey, David P." <david.dailey@sru.edu>, "Joe D'Andrea" <jdandrea@gmail.com>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
On Apr 18, 2007, at 19:30, Chris Wilson wrote: > Henri Sivonen wrote: >>> question about further patent entanglements associated with the >> >> I am not a lawyer. (Personally, I am not worried.) > > No, I expect not. But then, you aren't (fiscally responsible for) > shipping a browser, and probably don't have a huge pool of cash > that attracts lawsuits like lawyer catnip. > > As someone else pointed out, Microsoft lost (so far) a half-billion > dollar lawsuit to EOLAS. Opera got to change their behavior to > avoid the problem with no legal costs. (Speaking only about my personal perception and *relative* non- worriedness.) I didn't mean that I don't consider patents dangerous. I do. (I think the EOLAS case is a great example about what's wrong with the patent system on one hand and what's wrong with trial by jury on the other hand.) My (perhaps misguided) non-lawyer hunch just is that the <canvas> patent scare has been overblown after the forwarded message from the Apple lawyer (to which the best response is to publish <canvas> through a W3C WG in which Apple is participating). As far as the graphics algorithms go, Microsoft is already shipping WPF, so Microsoft is already on the hook for the kind of back end functionality <canvas> requires. As for potential patents from outside the WG, I really don't see any real reason to pick <canvas> as the subject of unsubstantiated patent scare instead of any random feature. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Wednesday, 18 April 2007 21:05:04 UTC