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Comment by senshan | Hacker News Reader

Brazil? Why a Brazilian patent is of such a significant interest elsewhere?

I think this was the final patent on it that was valid anywhere, so now the status changes from "someone has a patent globally and we need to consider this" to "no one has a patent." If you're distributing something globally, even one market that still has the patent might stop you from default shipping a driver touching on it, or you might have to worry about court orders at least. It's hard to avoid jurisdictions on the open web.

Is this the "install third-party software" checkbox in the Ubuntu installer?

I thought those were just the closed source drivers from Nvidia, Intel, and so on. But those vendors might have licenses for this kind of patent, especially Nvidia?

Right, but I thought it matters only if you sell something globally. Linux is distributed for free, so the burden of patent compliance is on the user, isn't it?

Not a lawyer, but patent law refers to distribution too. It shouldn't matter if it's free or has a price if they can say you're distributing it to Brazilian users.

Plenty of open source software avoids using patents even though it’s free. Selling doesn’t factor into it.

Distributing something for free doesn't mean you don't have patent obligations if you do it in the country that patent is valid in. On top of that, many corporations do sell their distribution of Linux.

Both Ubuntu and RedHad sell a product, as do few other

Nope. Distribution is what matters.

Presumably it's an "international patent" filed in Brazil.

You don't have to file your patent in every jurisdiction. There have been treaties for recognising each others intellectual property rights since the late 19th century and Brazil has been part of these from the start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation...

So, I recently learned about this from my company's patent lawyers. Patents only give protection in countries where they are filed. So, you can not create a product in Brazil that violates a Brazilian patent. And, you cannot import a product into Brazil that violates that patent. But, there is nothing stopping you from making that product in the US and selling it to Americans. The whole treaty business essentially means that most countries have roughly equivalent laws and you can file the same patent in multiple countries if you are willing to pay the fees. What countries you pay to file in then becomes a commercial decision.

I didn't realize that, thanks! After looking at Wikipedia for a bit it seems there are two phases under the PCT, an international phase that is sort of like the main part of a patent application, and then the national phase that actually creates the patents in each region/nation based on the first phase. The first phase is like what I had in mind: You file once in one country but the results of this filing apply everywhere.

So as I understand it you don't have to do the full process everywhere, but you have to actively register everywhere where you want protections. And there is no automatism to the second step(?)

https://www.wipo.int/en/web/pct-system/faqs/faqs

You are talking about the Paris Convention. The parent poster was talking about the Patent Law Treaty. The Paris Convention made it easier to file in other member countries after filing in your home country, but you still have to file in each country you wish to be covered in. The much newer Patent Law Treaty allows for "international" patents, which only need to be filed once to be applicable in all member countries.

As I understand it (and IANAL), an international patent makes it a lot easier to file in multiple countries (single application as you say), but you still have to pay the fee to each country you want protection in.

By your company's patent lawyers' logic then, any American drug or technical doodad patented in America is totally legal to be knocked off in Majarashtra or Taiwan or Guangzhong. Pretty sure if you tried pulling this you would be disappointed with the outcome. Not that it is not done (obviously), but that it (pretty sure) isn't legal.

If it hasn't also been patented in India or Taiwan or China, that is 100% correct (but they can't ship it to the US). However, it would be typical to patent in all of those countries at the same time.

I'm going to trust a patent lawyer over someone on the internet. And so should you, if this situation applies to you, don't trust me: get a lawyer.

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