Re: Recent Purge of Content "per Fedora Legal"
On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 01:01 -0500, Christopher Antila wrote:
Hi:
I'm just wondering what's going on with the recent purge of content "per
Fedora Legal." Why is this happening now?
I can't say for sure, but lately the patent trolls have been loosing
some of the more direct cases, so they seem to be making cases that are
more and more strained.
Consider: Joe Blow writes some cool code, doesn't want to go through all
the details of making sure it isn't unencumbered, puts it on rpmfusion.
Some troll notices some bit of code that he can patent, these days
pretty much any chunk of code can get a patent from the clueless PTO.
Joe Blow probably never even realizes that someone patented his code.
Troll probably puts the code in some "product" to have a case, but this
is a minor cost compared to the reward. Let's say troll puts a price of
$100 on his code, maybe nobody buys it, but that doesn't matter.
Now troll wants to find someone to sue. Joe Blow has no money, but
Fedora pointed people to the "illegal" code, Red Hat has money so guess
who gets sued. There have been a fair number of recent cases where the
victim of the suit is merely someone who linked to the site containing
the offending code. The DMCA makes this a pretty winnable approach.
Troll can then claim that all or most Fedora users would have bought his
code except that Fedora directed people to the "pirated" code. Damages
could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars for losses to this bogus
product.
I don't know that is what is behind it, but if I were a Red Hat lawyer
it is the sort of thing I'd loose sleep over.
--McD