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Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

I still think the idea that customers of an infringing product can be liable is completely bonkers.

Devil's advocate: I want to use your technology so I create another company to develop an infringing product and sell it to me cheap.

Then your new company is at issue not you as a customer.

Simple, open the new company in China.

Foreign companies may be penalized by a domestic court, as liens or other pecuniary penalties may be assessed on their transactions with entities in the court's jurisdiction.

That new company is probably entitled to limited liability. So you can sue it, but all the patent holder can get is whatever assets that company has (which, if end users are paying a very cheap price for the patented technology, may not be very much). In contrast, you would personally face essentially unlimited liability if the patent holder could sue you directly.

I don't see a moral objection to building your own versions of patented products for your own use, either, though.

Putting aside stuff that shouldn't be patented: 1) Selling a product with someone else's patent seems like something that should be discouraged. Giving it away counts here, as do other distribution methods. 2) Making your own product, for your own use, that someone else has a patent on seems perfectly reasonable and should be legal, in my opinion as a layman.

I'd add in "for your own non-commerical use". If you're in a market where there are only a handful of customers (e.g. the U.S. mobile market) but your invention generates an incredible amount of value for each customer, if those customers make the patented invention for their own use, that could deprive the patent holder out of a significant amount of income.

A court can pull back the corporate veil, and penalize the shareholder(s) or director(s) of any company if these individuals are deemed to have been using the company's separate legal personality for the purpose of wrongdoing.

This is a point that I think technical people miss: the law does not execute like code. Humans are in the loop, and are allowed to apply their own judgement.

This can be hard to win in practice though, especially if the infringing party's lawyers do a good job of maintaining the fiction that the corporation is a separate entitiy.

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