[License-review] Submitting CC0 for OSI approval

[Richard Fontana]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 12:14:45PM -0600, Karl Fogel wrote:
> By the awy, both MIT and BSD contain language strongly implying that
> they are copyright notices 

They are clearly copyright notices, but

> and apply only to rights within that domain.

It does not necessarily follow that a mere copyright license has no
implications for some relevant subbundle of the copyright licensor's
patent rights, unless perhaps, as with [my reading of] CC0 4a, the
license (or waiver+fallback license) is quite explicit in removing the
possibility of its grant of permissions as extending in any way to the
patent domain.

> I mention this because there have been some other posts on this list --
> forgive me, in a thread this big I'm not going to try for citation on
> this :-) -- mentioning that some popular OSI-approved licenses don't
> explicitly restrict themselves to copyright, and so could in theory be
> interpreted as conveying patent rights as well.  I can't remember which
> licenses that poster mentioned, but in any case MIT and BSD appear to be
> pretty clearly copyright-specific.

Again, there is not necessarily any conflict between those two ideas. 

- Richard