Subject:
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Re: Announcing LEGO Digital Designer 1.0
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad, lugnet.lego.direct
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Date:
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Wed, 30 Apr 2003 07:03:44 GMT
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Viewed:
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2377 times
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In lugnet.cad, Erik Olson writes:
> In my opinion, what killed the community's enthusiuasm for working with LEGO
> was LEGO's intention to patent the file format (and complicate it to do so.)
That's raises an interesting moral and ethical dilemma: Is it morally
acceptable to support the LXF format? Do you think anyone will boycott it?
> Since then, LEGO has obtained a government monopoly on CAD that is so broad,
> it could even be construed to cover LDRAW (if not for the obvious fact that
> LDRAW is prior art, aside from the lack of documentation of that fact.)
Aren't millions of copies of USENET articles dating back to 1994-5
documentation enough?
> At the least, no one can know where they stand without hiring a lawyer.
> Since we are writing code for free, that's not really in the cards.
Hiring a lawyer for this might be a good use of LDraw.org funds. I'll
personally pledge to donate $100 USD toward LDraw.org hiring a patent lawyer
to look for potential issues if someone is serious enough to follow through
with it.
> For this reason, it is necessary for LEGO to freely license its
> recently-acquired "intellectual property" (I emphasize the dubious nature of
> software patents) if it wants something in return, i.e. that we all work
> with LEGO for free. Anything less will leave uncertainty, fear and doubt.
I agree.
> The matter will probably never be clear. I doubt Compaq will license its
> software patents for virtual LEGO.
Compaq (HP?) owns software patents on virtual LEGO???
--Todd
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Announcing LEGO Digital Designer 1.0
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| In my opinion, what killed the community's enthusiuasm for working with LEGO was LEGO's intention to patent the file format (and complicate it to do so.) Since then, LEGO has obtained a government monopoly on CAD that is so broad, it could even be (...) (21 years ago, 30-Apr-03, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.lego.direct)
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