[p2p-hackers] Online Codes

[Susheel Daswani]

Folks, it is not the case that you infringe on a patent if you
infringe ANY of the claims.  You must infringe all.  I an not a
lawyer, but I am training to be one :).  Here is the content of a
message I sent a few months back:

--------------
I'm not sure how everyone is handling the Altnet patent threat, but in
my studies I've come across some salient points regarding patent
infringement:

"For an accused product to literally infringe a patent, EVERY element
contained in the patent claim must also be present in the accused
product or device.  If a claimed apparatus has five parts, or
'elements', and the allegedly infringing apparatus has only four of
those five, it does not literally infringe.  This is true even though
the defendant may have copied the four elements exactly, and
regardless of how significant or insignificant the missing element
is."
'Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age', 3rd Edition, page 230

This may already be known, but I thought I'd put it out there.
So everyone should analyse their hashing systems to see how they
compare to Altnet's patent elements.  If you don't do everything they
do, you can ignore their dinky letter :).  I'm going to analyse their
claims soon and compare to the systems I know.

Some more interesting information, which is probably obvious:
"[I]t does not matter [if] a defendant has ADDED several new elements
-- adding new features cannot help a defendant escape infringement."
--------------

Susheel


On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:53:30 +0100 (MET), b.fallenstein at gmx.de
<b.fallenstein at gmx.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 12:29:36 -0800, agthorr at cs.uoregon.edu
> <agthorr at cs.uoregon.edu> wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 09:16:57AM +1300, Nick Johnson wrote:
> > > Since infringing a patent requires meeting all the claims, it seems
> > > likely to me that Online Codes won't infringe Digital Fountain's
> > > patents. However, IANAPL.
> >
> > IANAL either, but it was my understanding that infringing a patent
> > occurs when you infringe any of the claims, though a court may dismiss
> > some claims as being overly broad.
> 
> You're correct. What Nick was thinking about is that infringing a
> patent requires infringing all *steps* in one particular claim. So if
> you have a patent with claims like
>