Question about documentation and patents

[Matthew Flaschen]

John Cowan wrote:
> 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?

I would say probably not, but it may depend on the license.

> IOW, suppose that rather than giving you an implementation under the AFL

The AFL patent grant says, "Licensor grants You a worldwide,
royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable license, under patent claims
owned or controlled by the Licensor that are embodied in the Original Work"

I think "embodied" means the Work reads on (i.e. infringes if there's no
license) the patent.  Writing about a technique never infringes a
patent, so I don't think the AFL patent license would grant anything for
documentation.

> or the Apache

Apache says, "such license applies only to those patent claims
licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their
Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with
the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted."

Again, documentation itself never infringes a patent, so the patent
license wouldn't cover anything.

> In that case, would you feel safe
> writing an implementation without regard to what patents I might hold?

No, but writing software is never safe anymore.

Matt Flaschen