Mesa Developers Still Fear Patent Wrath With S2TC

[oibaf]

Maybe an online petition...

[Azpegath]

Maybe an online petition...

Hahaha, I rofled at that

[del_diablo]

Heres the address for HTC in Europe: Wellington Street, Slough, Berkshire SL1 1YP, England. Maybe mesa developers would write an official inquiry letter that someone could bring personally to that office and make sure it get to the right person. Id go, but I dont have the letter or live in Berkshire ;(

It seems this is the actually best solution.
Oh, and add a clausule: If no reply is given within a month, it will be assumed it does not infringe on the patent.

[marek]

If no reply is given within a month, it will be assumed it does not infringe on the patent.

What law is that?

[Otus]

Could some one explain the details: I can't see why a driver for a licensed hardware implementation would infringe any patent?

[del_diablo]

What law is that?

I do not know how enforcable it will be, but if it is even barely enforceable it means that the MESA project will be patent immune to ST3C patent infrigiments until eventual attempt at being sued, and even then you can just point at the letter, and say "you didn't reply", and then remove the code afterwards.
Providing enough letters is sent, so that the letter did not get lost in the mail system, and there is enough markings and stamps on the letter to make it sure that it was not just a random fraud.
But then again: Not sure how enforcable it is. But if they receive the letter, whoever is in charge reads it, and no reply is given, it should be pretty enforcable in any court, providing one can prove they have read it.

[Azpegath]

I do not know how enforcable it will be, but if it is even barely enforceable it means that the MESA project will be patent immune to ST3C patent infrigiments until eventual attempt at being sued, and even then you can just point at the letter, and say "you didn't reply", and then remove the code afterwards.
Providing enough letters is sent, so that the letter did not get lost in the mail system, and there is enough markings and stamps on the letter to make it sure that it was not just a random fraud.
But then again: Not sure how enforcable it is. But if they receive the letter, whoever is in charge reads it, and no reply is given, it should be pretty enforcable in any court, providing one can prove they have read it.

I think that this sounds like the thoughts and ideas of a logical and technical person, and sadly that is not how the legal system works. You have to think like a lawyer (and a huge company) and not like a sane human being.

[allquixotic]

I think that this sounds like the thoughts and ideas of a logical and technical person, and sadly that is not how the legal system works. You have to think like a lawyer (and a huge company) and not like a sane human being.

Actually there might be some room in the legal system for this kind of thinking. It has happened before that a company or individual has lost their rights to a patent or trademark due to not enforcing it. To put it in layman's qualitative terms, basically, if someone abuses the heck out of your patent; you know about their abuse; but you don't do anything about it; then you can lose the rights to your patent because the system assumes that you are implicitly condoning the unlicensed patent use.

The best thing we could do is provide official legal notice to HTC that we believe they possess a patent that we have the capability to infringe. If they don't threaten us, don't explicitly license the patent, and don't take any legal action against anybody, then it might be defensible to say that they aren't enforcing their patent and therefore should use it. But we would have to provide legally-admissible proof that the code is being actively executed in an environment other than for private individual use, which AFAIK is protected. So we'd have to give HTC the names of for-profit companies that actively use unlicensed code that infringes on S3TC -- and then pray that, rather than suing them, they either do nothing (good) or license the patent to the general public (better). But of course instead of doing either of those things they might end up suing the company, and then we'd feel bad for basically being tattle-tails to get HTC some easy money. And we all know that the overly-conservative US court system would uphold the patent and we'd be back to square one.

[yesterday]

I think that this sounds like the thoughts and ideas of a logical and technical person, and sadly that is not how the legal system works. You have to think like a lawyer (and a huge company) and not like a sane human being.

This is not thinking like a sane person. This is thinking like a retarded monkey. If anyone can add legally binding clauses to UNSOLICITED mail they send out, we would be living in fucking chaos.

Clause A: The reading of this post means you accept my position on the matter
Clause B: On accepting my position you must give me access to all your intellectual property.

[yesterday]

The best thing we could do is provide official legal notice to HTC that we believe they possess a patent that we have the capability to infringe. If they don't threaten us, don't explicitly license the patent, and don't take any legal action against anybody, then it might be defensible to say that they aren't enforcing their patent and therefore should use it.

Yeah, none of this makes any difference for patents. Companies can choose how and on whom they enforce their patents. Whether you must pay fees is at the discretion of the patent holder. They can choose to ignore it for as long as they want, and they can choose to charge whenever they want. The onus is on YOU to ensure that you do not infringe. There is no such "not-enforced" defense for patents.