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Richard is Senior Commercial Counsel on the Products and Technologies team in Red Hat's legal department. Most of his work focuses on open source-related legal issues.
Richard Fontana
Richard is Senior Commercial Counsel on the Products and Technologies team in Red Hat's legal department. Most of his work focuses on open source-related legal issues.
Authored Comments
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier just wrote an article on the erroneous conflation of copyright infringement with stealing, worth reading:
http://dissociatedpress.net/2010/07/03/infringement-is-not-stealing/
A number of people have been making this point. It is legitimate to view all software patents in isolation as 'bad' (i.e., regardless of how they are used), and indeed this has been Red Hat's corporate position, though expressed in different words (see e.g. http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html and http://press.redhat.com/2009/10/01/one-small-leap-for-open-source-one-giant-leap-for-mankind/). Even so, it is not inconsistent with this view to regard some software patents as clearly worse than others -- namely, those that do not even meet the statutory requirements for issuance of a patent. That was true of the patent claims asserted in this litigation against Red Hat and Novell: they did not meet the legal requirements of novelty and non-obviousness because of the existence of prior art.