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Because you "stealing" IP does not require that you stole anything intentionally, it matters when you happened to do the same thing. There are patents for thin

Because you "stealing" IP does not require that you stole anything intentionally, it matters when you happened to do the same thing. There are patents for things like paxos, TCP, "network servers" and everything else. If you write down that you looked up a wikipedia page about the topic, and then some notes about your implementation - it may look legally like you stealing IP even though you are doing nothing nefarious.

maxerickson 9y ago
Maybe a patent lawyer can weigh in, but I think it does require intent. Like if your notes demonstrated independent discovery, that wouldn't create any liability. You could be prevented from ongoing use of the IP though.
- codemac 9y ago
  That's not the impression I got from lawyers in the past, but I think I just have a lot of fear in the area. Getting real legal advice for this is something I should probably do.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  You might be thinking of wilful infringement, which in some jurisdictions can significantly increase the penalties for infringing some types of IP rights. This in turn can lead to the perverse position that someone doing R&D in a certain field may be advised by their IP lawyer not to read existing research papers or patents, so that at least if they infringe and get sued, they can honestly say they didn't know and it wasn't wilful. Of course this completely undermines the entire principle of publishing knowledge through academic papers, disclosing inventions through patents, and so on.
  - gowld 9y ago
    Not really. The patent is filed with details so that when the patent expires, the design is ready to be disseminated freely without risk of legal challenge.
    - Silhouette 9y ago
      And in the meantime, it is openly disclosed so that others can learn from it and potentially it is available for licensing if it or later inventions based on it are valuable enough. If you weren't going to do that, and you wanted to have a system that discouraged actually looking at what's already out there in case you infringed it knowingly, you might as well just let people file for anything but keep it secret for N years.

maxerickson 9y ago

Maybe a patent lawyer can weigh in, but I think it does require intent. Like if your notes demonstrated independent discovery, that wouldn't create any liability. You could be prevented from ongoing use of the IP though.

codemac 9y ago
That's not the impression I got from lawyers in the past, but I think I just have a lot of fear in the area. Getting real legal advice for this is something I should probably do.
Silhouette 9y ago
You might be thinking of wilful infringement, which in some jurisdictions can significantly increase the penalties for infringing some types of IP rights. This in turn can lead to the perverse position that someone doing R&D in a certain field may be advised by their IP lawyer not to read existing research papers or patents, so that at least if they infringe and get sued, they can honestly say they didn't know and it wasn't wilful. Of course this completely undermines the entire principle of publishing knowledge through academic papers, disclosing inventions through patents, and so on.
- gowld 9y ago
  Not really. The patent is filed with details so that when the patent expires, the design is ready to be disseminated freely without risk of legal challenge.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    And in the meantime, it is openly disclosed so that others can learn from it and potentially it is available for licensing if it or later inventions based on it are valuable enough. If you weren't going to do that, and you wanted to have a system that discouraged actually looking at what's already out there in case you infringed it knowingly, you might as well just let people file for anything but keep it secret for N years.