Question about documentation and patents

[Michael Tiemann]

On Nov 24, 2007 1:49 PM, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> 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?


Not me.  I would presume the patent grant applied to methods related to
printing, indexing, formating, displaying or otherwise dealing with 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?

Not at all.

>
>
> 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.

My perception is informed by the fact that I often write documentation for
things I don't understand.  Just because I document it doesn't mean I have
the rights to the patents (known or unknown) that the subject matter covers.


>
>
> --
> John Cowan    cowan at ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan<http://ccil.org/%7Ecowan>
> 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
>
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