Re: legal status of David Brownell's zcip code

On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 15:06, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> For the record, in future situations, one shouldn't actively seek out
> attention on legal issues, or even look for patents.  Once you know
> about a patent then yes you are legally responsible to seek permission
> to use it.

In general I agree. For IETF standards however, there is a registry of
patents that may affect an proposed standard or even a RFC. That is the
way the IETF seeks to avoid making a patented technology a standard.

In such a case however, it might be unwise to ignore those patents,
because in court the patent holder could argue that just because you
implemented an IETF standard, you should have seen such a patent
registry and therfore you should have known about the patents.


Ciao
  Andi

-- 
Andreas Hofmeister
Coreworks Systementwicklung GbR
Burkheimerstr. 3
79111 Freiburg
fon ++49.761.45684.21
http://www.coreworks.de



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