[Cc'd to debian-legal in the hope of some informed comment.] On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 14:53 -0400, Matthias Julius wrote: > Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes: > > > Er, by definition a patent is supposed to include a complete description of > > the invention that would permit a third-party to reimplement the invention, > > in exchange for granting the inventor exclusive rights to the invention for > > a limited time. Would you argue that distributing copies of the patent > > application is infringement, too? > > While you are probably free to distribute the description you are not > free to distribute an implementation of the technology claimed by the > patent. You can implement it but you can not distribute the > implementation. There is an argument that source code can only be a description whereas a binary is an implementation, so only distributing binaries that include the claimed invention could infringe. I'm not sure whether this has been legally tested. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings If God had intended Man to program, we'd have been born with serial I/O ports.
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