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Overcompensating

Overcompensating is a webcomic (that one is safe for work) which I’ve been reading for years. Patently-O is a blog about patents which I read occasionally — I must admit that my interest in comics pre-dates my interest in patents. It (Patently-O) has a link up to a guide to patent damages. I’m not going to recommend to people on PlanetKDE to read it in particular (PlanetFSFE, maybe), but a few things struck me as I paged through it: one, that it’s remarkably readable, for a document produced by the legal profession; two, that it’s a practices guide that is quite concrete in what needs to be done and how things are handled; three, that it doesn’t talk about non-commercial infringement at all, as far as I can tell.

Since patents on software implementations of algorithms and the like continue to be granted in the US — witness HP’s patent on choosing a number base for a given processor or Google’s patent on map-reduce (apply a function to items in a list, then aggregate) — understanding the potential end-results (damages when infringing) is a big deal.