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

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

IANAL so I can not answer whether the explicit limitation of the patent
license in section 3 limits any other implicit patent license in any given
jurisdiction.

I would assume as a layperson that explicitly stating that no other
express or implied patent licenses are granted trumps any implicit patent
licenses that might be inferred from text elsewhere.

If so, is a very narrow patent license of only those patents invented by
the authors of the copyrighted work.  That makes the patent license issue
tractable for large research organizations.

Here's the text:

3. Grant of Patent License.

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor
hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge,
royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent
license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and
otherwise transfer the Work, where 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.
If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a
cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a
Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or
contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You
under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such
litigation is filed. Any patent license granted hereby with respect to
contributions by an individual employed by an institution or organization
is limited to patent claims where the individual that is the author of the
Work is also the inventor of the patent claims licensed, and where the
organization or institution has the right to grant such license under
applicable grant and research funding agreements. No other express or
implied licenses are granted.



On 2/27/12 11:28 AM, "John Cowan" <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

>Tzeng, Nigel H. scripsit:
>
>> ECL is nice middle ground between throwing the towel in and explicitly
>>not
>> granting any patent rights or releasing everything expecting eventually
>>to
>> be burned.  Actually the latter is not a viable explicit option so in
>> higher likelihood, once appraised of such risk, any sane management
>>would
>> prohibit open sourcing anything until something like ECL was built or
>> going with an explicit non-grant like what MIT was seeking before.
>
>I don't understand what you think (as opposed to what a court thinks) the
>ECL is supposed to do.  It has the magic word "use", suggesting an
>implicit
>patent license.
>
>-- 
>John Cowan
>        cowan at ccil.org
>                I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin
>_______________________________________________
>License-review mailing list
>License-review at opensource.org
>http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-review