Quoting Dave Ahn <ahn at orion.netrek.org>:

> A number of key netrek contributors were involved in this law suit
> including myself.

Dave and I were interviewed by the defendant's IP attourneys vi e-mail
and face to face during the Spring/Summer of 2000.  We showed them
what the game was, how it worked, and the technical background of the
game and code overview.  I was interviewed for about 4 hours or so at
my home and I gave them an explanation of the game as it related to
the Plaintiff's patent claims.  The pdf Dave gave a link to does a
good job describing what the patent claims were about and how Netrek
related. 

After they were done with Dave and I, they were extremely excited, so
we pointed them to the Netrek history Gurus and founders for the
authoritative "Yes, this was going on before the patent was filed"
statements, (Kevin Smith, et al.)  They apparently got the
declarations they needed from them.

Afterwards, I was interviewed again for about 2 hours as a final loose
end wrap-up.  I got a nice dinner out of that one.

We asked for, and received permission to do a Slashdot story along the
lines of "Netrek helps kill a stupid patent", but I believe we decided
not to when we heard the case was settled instead of having the patent
invalidated.  Since the patent was still in force, we thought it best
to lay low since they could come after Netrek.

> If you search vanilla-list, there should be some archived messages
> about this issue.

Dave, after the initial query by Chawla and the initial responses,
you, James, and I decided to not tell the rest of the Netrek community
what was going on after we found out who the interested parties
were. So there's not much on the vanilla-l archive.

Most of our discussions were via IRC, though we did have some e-mail
interactions.  For some odd reason, I didn't save my half of the
emails, just you quoting me.

--Carlos V.

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