The first rule of patents is you do not go looking for patents. US law is written in a really stupid way, such that if you knowingly infringe, damages triple. Because America uses the patent office as a revenue source, basically everything you can possibly imagine is covered by some ridiculous patent so if you go looking you will always find applicable patents on every idea and then you end up potentially much worse off.

Most companies (Google certainly included) have therefore banned their staff from reading patents, thus ensuring that the whole point of them, the sharing of knowledge, doesn't actually function! And it's much better I think if we follow the same policy. So please do not ever mention that suchandsuch is patented on this list! When it comes to patent law, ignorance is bliss. Patents are written in a heavily obfuscated manner such that actually trying to learn from them is hard work anyway.

One reason I wrote up the contracts stuff when I did is to get it out there into the public domain, so people couldn't patent the basics of the Bitcoin protocol. It'll be much better for everyone if new ideas are just put right out into the public domain. Please do not patent Bitcoin related research you do, even if you think it's for the best:

1) Defensive patenting doesn't work. The whole idea was mutually assured destruction, you hit me I'll hit you type of logic, but the prevalence of shell/troll companies killed off that idea. Plus it turns out that big companies are quite willing to sue each other into oblivion anyway. Once a patent exists, it'll be used as a weapon by someone eventually, and attempting to "fight back" is probably not a workable strategy. Far better to ensure the material is simply unpatentable by anyone.