On Sat, 22 Apr 2000, Joerg Mayer wrote:
> Hmm, I wonder whether just decoding a patented network protocol violates
> the patent. Personally I don't think so, but then, I live in Germany :-)
> Btw: The situation is the same with Cisco's ISL and we decode that.
I Am Not A Lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but I understand the
situation as follows. (This is all from the perspective of what I think I
know about U.S. law.)
There's an important distinction between patents and trade secrets. A
trade secret is protected by specific language in the license for products
that incorporate it, specifying that the licensee must keep the licensor's
secrets in order to prevent a breach of contract. Once a trade secret
escapes and becomes public knowledge, that protection is lost. The owner
of the secret can sue a licensee for divulging the secret, if that's how
it escaped, but I don't know of any way to put the genie back in the
bottle. If someone not a licensee figures out the secret, the owner has
no recourse that I know of except to buy that someone's silence before the
secret is published.
Patents protect *any* realization of the patented idea. Patent protection
can only be lost if the idea is shown not to be new after all ("prior art"
exists) or when the term of the patent expires. Even if someone in
country X (where the patent's validity is not recognized) figures out the
idea and publishes it, the idea is still protected in the U.S. so long as
the patent is valid and unexpired.
Many protocols and other interfaces are trade secrets. Reverse
engineering *may* make these safe to reimplement. Patented interfaces,
however, may be reverse-engineered and still not safe to use without
license in some parts of the world.
Let's be careful out there.
--
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mwood@xxxxxxxxx
"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!"
-- Marvin Martian, 01/01/2000 00:00:00
