"Mark H. Wood" 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.)
IANAL either, but patents make Claims (note the capital C). Unless a
Claim makes displaying information about a protocol restricted (i.e.,
there's a Claim lurking in the patent that says something to the effect
of "Claim 324: further, apparatus to visualize, divulge or otherwise
present information pursuant to claims 1-323, ..."), decoding a patented
protocol should be safe.
A good example is the HSRP protocol (RFC 2281). It it protected by US
patent 5,473,599 (see
http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&pn=US05473599__
for details, Kudos to IBM for this excellent web site!)
If you want to implement HSRP, you'll run afoul of this patent. If you
just want to display the HSRP packets, you should be okay.
The patent (that I presume to be the one for LAT, it's hard to tell with
all the legalese), is at
http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&pn=US05058108__
My reading of the background (and the 32 claims, I actually read them)
is that if you want to achieve the Good Things they claim, using the
bits and pieces they mention, you need to talk with their lawyers.
There's not a hint of viewing the packets being covered.
So, yes, let's be careful out there, but don't let fear of the unknown
get in the way too much.
Cheers,
-- Bert
--
Bert Driehuis, MIS -- bert_driehuis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- +31-20-3116119
Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an
orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.
