[Osia-discuss] Re: [Linux-aus] Re: Hooks to the AU patent process

[Jonathan Oxer]

On Fri, 2004-08-06 at 12:08, Con Zymaris wrote:

> Owning patents without an effective legal offensive capability is pretty
> close to useless. 
> 
> Hoping that you can scare big vendors who may try to damage the open
> source industry by owning patents that they themselves tresspass, wont
> work. You need serious legal firepower to take those guys on. Most
> Australian developers and SMEs don't have that firepower.

Hi Con! Long time no talk.

Sure, maybe what I'm doing *is* useless, I don't know. But there's the
slim chance that it will help, perhaps in a situation where someone
trespasses on one of my provisional patents that I don't have resources
to defend but where other interested parties can help out. Obviously I
don't expect unlimited free legal assistance to defend all my
provisional patents, but it just may be that a situation comes up where
some little FOSS developer happens to have a [provisional]patent and a
BigCo tries to stomp on them and the rest of the community rallies
behind the developer on that one issue to make a point.

Having a few [provisional]patents hanging in the wings in case of such a
situation may be helpful, and it's a trivial thing for me to take the
first step of filing provisional patent applications so I thought I'd
just do it. I am under no illusion that it provides me magical power
over those who choose to ignore them.

Cheers   :-)

Jonathan Oxer