Potential patent issues

[Nick Sabalausky]

"retard" <re at tard.com.invalid> wrote in message 
news:ih7dih$q49$2 at digitalmars.com...
> Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:50:46 -0500, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
>
>> On 01/18/2011 05:52 PM, BlazingWhitester wrote:
>>>
>>> Walter, could you give some comments about this? Does dmd violate
>>> anything?
>>
>> It's probably in Walter's best interest to not even look at it.
>>
>> On the one hand, it's probably a crap software patent that the Patent
>> Office has been handing out like candy, and removing basic features that
>> have been patented could cripple D. Whoever owns it might not decide to
>> sue, Walter's implementation might not infringe, it might be
>> invalidated, etc.
>>
>> On the other hand, if Walter is sued and found to have infringed the
>> patent, and if he "willfully infringed", meaning he had knowledge of the
>> patent, then he could face up to three times damages.
>
> At least he knows it now unless he deliberately ignores all newsgroup
> posts containing the word 'patent'. I think only C# and D market the
> language with a feature 'delegate'. What's fun is that even if you're
> right and there's prior art or the patent is way too trivial, the patent
> trial can become very expensive.

I'm no lawyer, and there are probably reasons why this wouldn't work, but 
what I would consider doing in that situation is pull together a clear-cut 
example of obvious prior art, stick it in their faces, *record*/*document* 
showing it to them, and when they don't back down, hire a lawyer to 
counter-sue for frivolous lawsuit or harassment or something.