- "Unfortunately our mineral oil aquarium PC kit project has been alleged to infringe on the patents held by a company who holds several patents related to mineral oil cooling of PCs."
What risible clowns. How could you dream of patenting this—oil-immersion cooling, in computing, goes back *at least* to 1961 [0] (and there's probably even earlier prior art, I can't find citations for the vacuum-tube era but it'd be very likely they had tried something like that). It's the most obvious solution in the world. "Oil-dunk hot thing for more cold" is a bronze-age blacksmith's wisdom.
My comment was a bit harsh as I wrote it, but, it's genuinely so depressing to read about the cool things people create, and then seeing them vanish from the internet, as morals-less lawyers swoop in and claim various falsehoods—on the calculation that the victim won't have the resources to fight against professional patent trolls. Against experts who specialize in legal extortion, such as this example.
- "...regardless of how we felt about the validity of this patent pressure, we could not devote the time, finances and energy to take up that battle"
These types of predators are the natural enemy of HN.
You could patent this, but it would be on specifics of the process & design, like how the chassis are constructed (down to the fabrication steps), special/unusual components, and exactly how the heat dissipation works.
It should be basically impossible for some hackers in a garage to accidentally infringe on a patent without reading it. If it was infringing, it would be 1) extremely unlucky, or more likely 2) the patent was fatally vague to begin with, and should be invalidated.
What risible clowns. How could you dream of patenting this—oil-immersion cooling, in computing, goes back *at least* to 1961 [0] (and there's probably even earlier prior art, I can't find citations for the vacuum-tube era but it'd be very likely they had tried something like that). It's the most obvious solution in the world. "Oil-dunk hot thing for more cold" is a bronze-age blacksmith's wisdom.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7030_Stretch ("The memory was immersion oil-heated/cooled to stabilize its operating characteristics")