Question about documentation and patents

[John Cowan]

I know YANLs (or YANMLs), but I wonder about people's perceptions on
this question:

If documentation, as opposed to source code, is released under a
FLOSS license with a patent grant, would people assume that the license
covers what is described by the documentation?  IOW, suppose that rather
than giving you an implementation under the AFL or the Apache or some
such "modern" permissive license, I just give you under the license a
description of what the program does.  In that case, would you feel safe
writing an implementation without regard to what patents I might hold?

Note that I am not so much asking about what the law is here as what
people perceive it to be, though if anyone wants to say what they think
the law is, that's good too.

-- 
John Cowan    cowan at ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion
that optimum or inadequate performance in the trend of competitive
activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity,
but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be
taken into account. --Ecclesiastes 9:11, Orwell/Brown version