[Zope] Software Patents and Content Management Systems

[Florent Guillaume]

Lennart Regebro  <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I am sorry for this excessive crossposting, but it is urgent and
> > important.
> 
> I agree.
> 
> > Please consider the listed patent descriptions in context of your
> > favorite Zope CMS and give feedback to Holger Blasum or Dirk Steuwer
> > from FFII. Clarify to them to which extent your favorite Zope CMS could
> > be affected by the given patent.
> 
> The name of a patent doesn't really say much. You now asked people,
> who mostly are not knowledgeable about patents, to read through a
> whole bunch of patents, and say if these may be applicable to their
> CMSs. I find that request quite unreasonable. Judging from the english
> titles alone, all the patents are applicable to anything that uses
> Zope, but I assume this is not what you need to know, as you surely
> are aware of that already.
> 
> A description (in english) of what the patents actually try to patent
> would probably be more useful. It is quite often very hard to figure
> that out from the patents itself, unless you are a patent clerk, which
> I'm not, and besides there are no links to the patents, so it is
> impossible to do anyway.
> 
> A list of what is actually supposed to be patented would be possible
> for us poor non-lawyers to actually go through and see if they are
> relevant.

Linus Torvalds and others have suggested that from a legal point of view
it is a bad idea to read through existing patents to see if some apply
to your software, because it shows you were aware of being infringing on
them.

Florent

-- 
Florent Guillaume, Nuxeo (Paris, France)   CTO, Director of R&D
+33 1 40 33 71 59   http://nuxeo.com   fg at nuxeo.com