Because of over incumbent patents, is it possible to safely develop any software without the risk of legal action?

Posted by Chris Barry on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Chris Barry
Published on 2012-11-08T11:58:33Z Indexed on 2012/11/09 11:21 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 304

Filed under:

legal

Take this System and method for restricting user access rights on the internet based on rating information stored in a relational database

There are hundreds of thousands of them out there.

So basically you can't program anything really without breaching one of thousands of software patents.

If your program succeeds you will be sued by someone!

Does this happen all the time and people get silenced?

Do trendy startups get hit by things like this? Surely all major web properties would have been hit by the example above by AT&T?

Related posts about legal

SCALE 8x: Free software legal issues

as seen on Internet.com - Search for 'Internet.com'
<b>LWN.net:</b> "But in reality the FLOSS ecosystem relies on a complex legal framework in order to run smoothly and to stand up to proprietary software competition: the various software licenses, contribution agreements, copyright and other "intellectual property" law." >>> More
Copyright infringement - inside the legal minefield

as seen on Internet.com - Search for 'Internet.com'
<b>New Zealand Herald:</b> "Several weeks ago the Australian high court ruled in favour of Aussie ISP iiNet in a landmark legal battle where AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) argued that iiNet was as guilty as some of its subscribers of online copyright infringement… >>> More
Signing redistributed files

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
In order to submit a desktop application for the Windows 8 app store, you need to digitally sign any driver or .exe associated with the application. However, the application I was trying to submit contains several files that are redistributions of other companies' software, and some of these are not… >>> More
Is it illegal to rewrite every line of an open source project in a slightly different way, and use it in a closed source project?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
There is some code which is GPL or LGPL that I am considering using for an iPhone project. If I took that code (JavaScript) and rewrote it in a different language for use on the iPhone would that be a legal issue? In theory the process that has happened is that I have gone through each line of the… >>> More
Is it really free to deploy SharpDevelop apps?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I'm trying SharpDevelop to develop c# applications. Regardless of the language and the IDE, is it free to deploy applications that use WinForms? I've been developing with MonoDevelop just because it has a designer for Gtk# (client doesn't want to pay more for licences as to use VS...), but it's too… >>> More

Developer IT

Because of over incumbent patents, is it possible to safely develop any software without the risk of legal action? - Developer IT

Because of over incumbent patents, is it possible to safely develop any software without the risk of legal action?

legal

Related posts about legal

SCALE 8x: Free software legal issues

Copyright infringement - inside the legal minefield

Signing redistributed files

Is it illegal to rewrite every line of an open source project in a slightly different way, and use it in a closed source project?

Is it really free to deploy SharpDevelop apps?

Categories cloud