Dan’s blog

Just as a heads up to anyone who cares, I’ll be giving a talk at OSCON this year entitled “Dispelling legal myths:  Things OSS developers get wrong about the law”.

After talking with some folks about the best way to present this, it will end up being a basic overview of how lawsuits, copyrights and patents actually work in the US legal system.  My purpose here is not to espouse views on these things, but instead transfer knowledge of how it all works, in the hopes of reducing ignorance of the “way things are now” among engineers, and in particular, OSS folks.

• For the legal system in general
  • How our legal system is broken up at the federal level
  • Anatomy of a lawsuit
  • Costs of a lawsuit
  • General rules of interpretation of statutes and laws (possibly, depends on time)
• For Copyright
  • What is copyrightable
  • What the actual copy rights involved are
  • Fair use
  • How infringements of these rights are determined by courts (IE tests used, etc)
• For Patents
  • What is patentable
  • What the actual rights granted by patents are
  • How patents are examined
  • How prior art is used
  • How courts determine validity of patents
  • How courts determine infringement of patents

I only have a limited amount of time to go into this stuff, so I plan on focusing particularly on software.  Anyone who knows copyright knows that most people don’t realize how complicated the rights around things like performances and sound recordings are. Rather than dumb things down, I’ve tried to explain enough of the underlying principles and situations that one could at least come up with reasonable answers given a more complicated situation.

If you have ever taken a course on IP law, copyrights, or patents, you will likely be very bored at this presentation

Though I may also get into contracts, licensing, and EULA’s.

Of course, I’m happy to answer questions about my views, or about pretty much anything legal while I’m around.  So if you plan on being there, please bring all the questions you’ve got.  I’ve got all the time in the world to answer them.

One of the more “controversial” pieces of the current Patent Reform Act of 2007 is the first-to-file provisions.   Part of the reason for this controversy is a misunderstanding of what it actually does when compared to our current system (first-to-invent).

In the current system, if two people file for a patent, something known as an “interference” is declare.  From there, both sides spend a lot of money in a bunch of complex court-like proceedings trying to prove who invented the thing being patented.  Whoever wins the interference proceeding gets the patent.  There are large battles over interferences, and there are law firms that specialize in handling them, because they can get quite complex.

In the proposed first-to-file system, if two people file for a patent, the one who filed first gets it.

That’s it.

Moving to a first-to-file system would have absolutely no effect on what is considered prior art.  If you go and publish something, it does not mean that someone can go and file a patent on it if you do not.  Your publication will still be prior art against their patent.

The real reason for first-to-file is to get rid of the weird system of interference proceedings we have, not to try to make more things patentable.

I’ve seen a lot of people complain about the size of SVN repositories.  The one thing all these people  share in common is that they are using repositories converted to CVS2SVN.   There is a reason for this:

CVS2SVN has a habit of misidentifying entire-branch copies.   As a result, you will usually end up with branches that are as big as the original branch (on-disk size wise), rather than being , say, 1000 bytes.

This is not to say that SVN repositories are great at space usage.   But as a rule of thumb, proper SVN repositories are always smaller than the equivalent CVS repository.

SVN has some problems in terms of repository storage formats.  We know this.  This is why SVN will probably going to move to something like revlogs for 2.0.  But a lot of the specific size problems i’ve seen complained about on the web or mailing lists, are usually just bad conversions.

There is coverage all over the place of the general sentiment of the supreme court decisions in
Microsoft v. AT&T and KSR v. Teleflex, but i’ll just give you the important points.
First, KSR v. Teleflex.
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As we move into the warmer days of spring, followed by summer, the DC metro area tends to get a large number of tourists.

This is true even though their was, at least as of two months ago, a Long Fence around the Capitol reflecting pool in order to protect you from the violent terrorist ducks that swim there with their cute future jihad-warring ducklings. Personally, this would scare me away, but we are a nation of brave patriots, unafraid of our mallardly enemies.

In any case, as most tourists are unfamiliar with the Metrorail system, I thought I would provide a guide to understanding the announcements you may hear from time to time, either on the trains, or in the stations. You see, Metro train and station operations speak a different language than the rest of us, even though it sounds very similar, so it is essential you understand the true meaning of what is being said.

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One of the pieces of GCC I maintain is the alias analysis, including our field-sensitive points-to analysis. Points-to analysis is one of the most published about areas of compilers, and yet it is rare to find papers that are actually applicable to real world compilers.

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Yesterday it was 75°F. Today it’s about 24°F and it’s hailing.  The deer that live around the area seem to be going insane over this.  They keep stopping to shake out their ears while digging for acorns.  I think the hail may be getting in their ears

“Right now i’m a hair-dresser, but i’d like to be a school counselor, because it makes more money”.

I weep for the children.

The furnace people came on Tuesday.  I don’t want to ruin the ending, but it’s warm here now.

Crap.

I just ruined the ending.

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The furnace died on Thursday

By died, I don’t so much mean it no longer functions, as much as I mean that they discovered a 3 1/2″ crack in the heat exchanger, which causes a very slight hazard of carbon monoxide poisoning to you and your entire family.

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