Notices by Karl Fogel (kfogel@kfogel.org)

(Thanks to Bouette and Nojhan in Wikimedia Commons for the camel image and llama image respectively.)

It's sometimes important when you publish a proof-of-knowledge hash to come back and publish the plaintext within a reasonable amount of time. Otherwise you might, for example, be posting hashes for mutually contradictory predictions, and then after a given prediction comes true you just post the plaintext for that hash while not showing any of the plaintexts for your wrong predictions.

I wouldn't want anyone to think I was doing anything like that! So here's the plaintext for my hash post of October 7th:

The context is too intricate for me to explain, so I won't. I'm just following up here now to retain credibility for any future proofs-of-knowledge I might post.

@evan @bnewbold @mmasnick My understanding (I am not a lawyer) is that pro-freedom patent pledges can be legally risky even for well-intentioned companies, unfortunately.

A company can make an internal decision to never enforce any of their patents, but then find themselves the target of incoming patent infringement claims for which the best defense is a counterclaim: "Oh yeah? Well, you're infringing some of ours. So how about we sit down and make a cross-licensing deal and call it even?"

Since competing companies tend to be in similar lines of business, the chances of them having mutually infringing patent claims are much better than random. Thus, having some patents in your back pocket -- even if you don't want nor intend to use them -- becomes a reasonable defensive tactic.

And it's not so simple to write a pledge that just says "We won't use our patents against anyone unless they use theirs against us first", either. What if another company uses patent infringement claims to restrict the options available to one of your partners / resellers / customers / whatever -- but it is you who have the patent portfolio that is able to make credible counterclaims? Since you weren't the one directly attacked, you'll now be violating your public pledge if you use your patents to protect freedom. Oops.

Mutual defense pools like OIN can help to address this transitive collective action dilemma, but they don't fully solve it. Fundamentally, the more legally binding public statements a company makes about what they won't do with their patents, the more they preëmptively tie their hands in some potential future patent-related dispute that is forced upon them by an outside party.

(There are, IIUC, other insidious things about the nature of patent law that make it hard for companies to even talk openly about what their plans are for their patents, or why they have acquired them, etc. Everything you say is there for your opponent's lawyers to pick apart some day, and it's hard to forecast the technical intricacies of every lawsuit or lawsuit-adjacent negotiation you might be involuntary involved in in the future. Open-ended promises are inherently risky.)

For these reasons, I am not judgemental about a company's patent portfolio, only about their actual patent behavior. It's wonderful & laudable when they make binding pro-freedom public promises -- but I hope that they do so with great care, and that they retain their ability to actually use whatever patent portfolio they may have to defend the commons when needed.

It's bad that we have a system that requires these counterintuitive tactics, but it's no particular company's fault that we're all operating in a bad system.

What @dangillmor said, everyone. And this is not even the first time we know of that Texas has executed an innocent person. As in actually innocent, like, didn't do it -- we're not talking about some technicality of the law here, we're talking about someone who is not guilty of the crime of which they are accused.

My point isn't even that Texas is especially bloodthirsty. It's that if you can find multiple examples from just one state, you can bet that other innocent people have been executed elsewhere in the U.S. too.

And that's not counting all the close calls, where some innocent soul was only finally freed because some student clinic at a law school randomly decided to take up their case (because states never give public defenders enough resources to do even a minimally adequate job).

The death penalty is a mistake. It should be abolished. It's so obvious by now that I hardly know how people manage to argue for its continuance (and yet they do -- in particular, politicians running for office do).

In the meantime, if you'd like to help limit the damage, support an organization like The Center On Wrongful Convictions.

Current "the world is increasingly designed for people not like me" peeve:

Official forms that come in the mail and do offer an online option, but only by scanning a QR code printed on the treeware -- the actual URL is not given in human-readable form anywhere.

@jzb @Discourse Why do browsers allow code received from web sites to do that? I mean, sure, the sites shouldn’t try to do it either, but also the browser should be easily configurable to not let keys be redirected if the user doesn’t want them to be (and maybe the browser should ship with a default configuration that protects certain key commands).