Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> > Only if the end user writes the software to decode the video, is the end
> > user doing any patent infringment.

> Not in the US. A patent covers using the invention as well as building it.

  I'm not a patent lawyer, but AFAIK here patents only cover selling or
distributing patented devices. You are still free to take a patent (all
patents are public), build the device yourself and use it freely. Only
if you start selling the devices you are building (and probably even if
you start distributing them for free) will the patent protection kick in.

  This makes a lot more sense to me, in more than one way. Most importantly,
a patent forbidding someone from building the patented device himself and
using it in private is more or less unenforceable. Laws which are
unenforceable are pretty useless.

  With physical devices it might in some cases make *some* sense to forbid
their private building and usage if the user somehow gets significant
benefits from it, espcially if the device is something you use in public
(let's say for example, something that you put on a visible part of your
car). However, given that you can (or could until very recently) patent
methods instead of devices in the US, it starts making less and less sense.
If you patent training a cat with a laser pointer, how exactly are you going
to enforce it? Are you going to put survaillance in everybody's home to see
that they are not breaking your patent?

> > So, if the video is sent of to Sealand as any other video format, and it
> > is encoded there and sent back as an h.264 format, it should be fine.

> I disagree with that. Decoding infringes the patents, at least in the USA. 

  Luckily that's not the case here. (Well, yet. Companies are lobbying the
EU really hard to make this happen. Let's hope the EU makes the wise decision
for once.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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