There have been a lot of comments here asserting that DC's legal argument is bull, that while you can patent a device, you can't patent a device driver or a device driving technique. As legal advice, this is flat-out wrong. While you may argue that such a patent law is, philosophically, a poor idea, or that a business strategy based on such a law is, financially, a bad idea, the law as it is very clearly protects such a strategy. Which is why any driver hacker who bothered to call his lawyer complied with DC's demands.
A patent protects a method which:
i) is new and non-trivial
ii) does something concievably useful
iii) works
It says that the patent holder that method.
It doesn't matter that you came up with the idea independently, mined the resources and built the device with your own hands, and wrote the code with your own two eyes and ten fingers. You may be just using the laws of physics but if you don't have the patent-holder's permission, you are breaking the laws of manon, and he will not hesitate to put you behind very physical bars for doing so.
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There have been a lot of comments here asserting that DC's legal argument is bull, that while you can patent a device, you can't patent a device driver or a device driving technique. As legal advice, this is flat-out wrong. While you may argue that such a patent law is, philosophically, a poor idea, or that a business strategy based on such a law is, financially, a bad idea, the law as it is very clearly protects such a strategy. Which is why any driver hacker who bothered to call his lawyer complied with DC's demands.
A patent protects a method which:
i) is new and non-trivial
ii) does something concievably useful
iii) works
It says that the patent holder that method.
It doesn't matter that you came up with the idea independently, mined the resources and built the device with your own hands, and wrote the code with your own two eyes and ten fingers. You may be just using the laws of physics but if you don't have the patent-holder's permission, you are breaking the laws of manon, and he will not hesitate to put you behind very physical bars for doing so.