Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Patent violation?

I recently got sued by Chivalrybean for violating his patent.  However, I feel I did not use the phrase he patented;  Although I did have four contiguous words that matched the four of his patent, the first two were patently in a different phrase from the last two.  Since the amount in question is so small, I would prefer to sort this out without a CfJ.

posted by Bucky at 26 Jun 2007 01:21:00 UTC Comments (3)

Comments

Brendan: he/him

26-06-2007 07:17:56 UTC

The Ruleset only allows us to patent phrases of four or more words, and says nothing about punctuation.  I know this is not an invulnerable argument, but patented phrases are so weak right now that I’m in favor of pretty much any edge-case use.

Brendan: he/him

26-06-2007 07:18:52 UTC

In addition, Chivalrybean’s patent includes a wildcard as its second word, which could match “Government,” just as easily as “Government”.

Chivalrybean:

26-06-2007 16:30:52 UTC

I agree, of course. It is not clearly stated that the phrase must be without any break or punctuation. I did see that the comma was there, and checked the rules, and saw nothing that obviously would prevent me from using my patent right.