[License-review] CC withdrawl of CC0 from OSI process

[Henrik Ingo]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 12:20 AM, Christopher Allan Webber
<cwebber at creativecommons.org> wrote:
> There have been questions about why that lanugage is there.  First of
> all, speculation that we did not anticipate CC0 usage for software at
> the time is true.  The patent language that exists comes out of
> conversations with the scientific data community, whom were a large
> target of adoption for the tool.  This community felt strongly that
> there was a need to clearly waive something into the public domain
> without also waiving patents in the process.  Hence the language.

So if a researcher wants to use CC0 when publishing a scientific
article, or some source data related to an article, or maybe even
pseudo code in the case of computer science and algorithms, he would
want his publication to be public domain, yet the university would
keep right to any patents filed during that research. Is this an
example use case with that audience?

If yes, sounds entirely understandable to me. Since simply reading or
copying scientific articles or data has very low risk of infringing
anyones patents anyway, I perfectly understand the language of CC0
with this background.

I suppose the good news is that it should be perfectly possible for
you - once CC has resources to go through such a process - to rewrite
the sentence in 4a such that this original goal is still achieved,
while also making it clear that in the case of software (and perhaps
other fields where patent risk may apply), the Affirmer has indeed
waived his rights to take legal action against parties using/executing
the Work that was put under CC0. While I understand your editorial
process is non-trivial, I certainly hope we will see a day when such a
license can be OSI certified.

henrik
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