[openip] Re: "rights" and "freedoms"

[Mark Shewmaker]

On Tue, Oct 19, 1999 at 09:33:26AM -0400, V. Alex Brennen wrote:
> "Ross N. Williams" wrote:
> > 
> > (One per 20 minutes is about 25,000 per year which I think is
> >  about the current rate. Anyone can correct me if I'm wrong, but
> >  even if it was just one patent issued a day, it would still be
> >  overwhelming).
> 
> The number of trivial software patent applications should
> slow  drastically if a significant number of such
> applications were rejected.

One way the organization could shrink the set of patents it would
need to look through is for it to ignore any patents that would be
licensed in a way that is friendly to its member's goals.

If you have a license to use the patent, and the license's
restrictions don't really restrict you or your goals, then
there's no need to spend the time and effort involved in an
attempt to invalidate it.  (Of course it's even better if the
license actually promotes your goals.)

I'm bringing this up here because I'm wanting to put together
such a license--a GPL-ish patent license that would allow
submitted patents to be incorporated into Open Source code,
and at another level allow submitted patents to be incorporated
into non Open Source code only if all the incorporated patents
were so licensed, (and it has other similar features as well.)

There would be no point in Patent Busters spending time and money
invalidating patents licensed under this Open Patent License, since
those patents presumably wouldn't pose a threat to Patent Busters'
clients to begin with.

(If anyone wants to look at what I've written on the Open Patent
License and surrounding info, it's at http://www.openpatents.org/ .
It's still in the early stages, and I haven't tried to widely
publicize it yet.  BTW, I'm not a lawyer, and although I've gotten
a bit of legal help on the idea, I haven't gotten legal help
on the written license itself so far.  I'm sure it currently has
holes all over the place--it's still very much a work in progress.)

 -Mark Shewmaker
  mark at primefactor.com