Author: Nick ODell 2016-10-14 19:01:13
Published on: 2016-10-14T19:01:13+00:00
The point of owning a patent is to use it offensively, either to prevent competition or get licensing fees. Defensive patents are useless in the case where litigants do not produce anything but rather their product is patent lawsuits. Sergio Demian Lerner expressed concerns about the DPL v1.1 stating that it is dangerous for Bitcoin users as current users may be confident they are protected but future generations of users can be attacked making Bitcoin technology fully proprietary and less valuable. Companies that join DPL can enforce their patents against anyone who has chosen not to join the DPL which means that most users of Bitcoin could be currently under threat of being sued by Bitcoin companies and individuals that joined DPL in the same way they might be under threat by the remaining companies. However, the DPL is still better than the status quo. One solution is to adopt the DPL irrevocably by stating that you will never invoke that 180-day notice provision. The revocability provision is a danger mainly to those who are unwilling to adopt the DPL themselves, perhaps because they support software patents. To prevent publishers from filing a US patent, every BIP and proposal to the Bitcoin mailing list should contain a note that grants everyone an irrevocable license. It would also be reasonable to consider changing the Bitcoin Core license to something like an Apache2/LGPL3 dual license to ensure the copyright license also has anti-patent protections.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T20:23:07.087313+00:00