[strommen]

There are lots and lots of ridiculous patent and patent claims occurring in the US. I'm glad that the EFF is fighting against them.

But this particular paragraph in this particular claim is by no means an abuse of patent law. The patent is about an "integer multiple" of a time period, which obviously excludes 0 and negatives, and arguably excludes 1.

If there's something else going on here, then please add it to the article. But otherwise, consider that when you stretch the truth to support an honorable cause, you are making that cause less honorable.

[Pyxl101]

I don't think it's obvious that an "integer multiple" of a quantity necessarily excludes 0 or 1. I could accept that it excludes zero if from the context that would make no sense. But to presume that it excludes 1 is a bit too much.

I'm not sure if I agree with the EFF's position completely, but I see where they're coming from.

Let's say that I was implementing linear backoff. I do this by multiplying my base delay time by an iterator i, where i starts at zero and count upwards. Sleep time = delay + delay * i. So after the first failure, we sleep "delay", and after the second failure we sleep "2 * delay", and so on. If I was describing this in words, I might say that I was multiplying the delay constant by the integer multiple i. In this context, it clarifies that the number is a whole number as opposed to a fraction.