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Comment by Sephr | Hacker News Reader

I was working on exactly this many years ago at the OFTN OSWG with an open source project called Hum.

I stopped development after Apple got sued for secure p2p video chat with the original version of FaceTime, seeing as Hum was also going to support secure multiparty p2p video chat. Unfortunately VirnetX (and by extension, the US military) owns a patent that would have made deployment of Hum difficult without an expensive legal team.

It's not too hard to imagine that the real reason you don't see many p2p encrypted communication platforms is US military-sponsored patent trolling. This aligns with their mass surveillance interests.

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Wait a minute here -- You're saying that the US military is patent trolling with secure, multiparty chat patents?

Can you link to said patents?

It's not really trolling in this case since they actually use and develop on the technology

The Ars Technica article on their lawsuit against Apple [1] said they advertised a product on their website but received zero revenue from that product and seemingly didn't have any engineers working on it.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/full-scale-of-ap...

Edit: Added the link.

The person is wrong. It's a private company that has the patent, the company works with the government. I don't know why he implies the government is involved in the patent suit, they are not.

"It's not too hard to imagine…" isn't exactly the same as saying "It's true that…". I don't have hard evidence, but it's not hard to imagine VirnetX being manipulated behind the scenes by the US government. Similar circumstances have happened in the past.

How has this affected open source efforts?

Because software patents apply to open source software too.

"How has this affected open source efforts?"

can be read as either

Why is it possible for [situation] to affect open source efforts?

In what way(s) has [situation] affected open source efforts?

The latter being more charitable because it also answers the first question and can assume the asker at least has a semblance of why it might be possible.

That was the sense I meant. If the US military is using patents like that I would want to know and be surprised that I had not heard about it already.

It seems like the sort of thing that would have been talked about on the internet a lot.

sad

Yeah, I'm working on a system that makes it easy to build P2P E2EE apps[1], and your comment has me a little freaked out.

I am not aware of any lawsuits or patents on this, could you send links / share your story more?

[1] https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...

Never ever search for patents, knowingly infringing on a patent is much worse than doing so unknowingly.

Are you saying the law has no requirement to do any sort of due diligence? I find that surprising.

Such a due diligence requirement would not be compatible with the current patent system, you are unlikely to be doing anything these days without infringing on someones patent.

Is knowingly turning a blind eye just as bad?

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