[ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[Bob Purvy]

When I took a year off in 2004, I got my license as a patent agent (google
it). I also worked in Google Patent Litigation for a few years.

There's very, very little value in most patents. Those unicorns you
mentioned are just that. It's usually pretty easy to "design around" a
patent, although of course there are a few that generate obscene amounts of
licensing fees. Furthermore, nearly all software or network patents can be
busted by a good prior art search, and I did that to quite a few of them.

Being an expert witness, though: THAT pays good bucks. At the Apple v.
Samsung trial, one witness testified that he got $850 an hour, and he put
in 900 hours on the case.

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 11:55 AM Carl Malamud via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Agreed.
>
> We initially ran our Securities and Exchange )SEC) server with ftp and
> gopher. Added WAIS and Web after the fact. When gopher imposed a license I
> didn’t quite understand (and no certainties on when/if additional terms
> would be added) we dropped it.
>
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 10:30 AM John Levine via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> > It appears that John Gilmore via Internet-history <gnu at toad.com> said:
> > >DARPA got exactly what they wanted from their contract with Berkeley --
> > >broad, rapid adoption of TCP/IP in their research community.  That would
> > >not have happened if they had paid the same amount but had asked
> > >Berkeley to license the results through a proprietary company.
> >
> > Gopher was (is?) a similar cautionary tale. It was a good design and
> > although it was a lot less flexible than the web, it was also a lot
> > easier to implement and loaded the servers less. In the 1993 first
> > edition of Internet for Dummies, Gopher and the Web each got a chapter
> > of about the same length.
> >
> > Then U of Minnesota decided that they would charge a licensning fee
> > for their Gopher server, and that was it. It disappeared while the Web
> > became, well, the Web.
> >
> > R's,
> > John
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