> Person as in a legal person. This includes entities like corporations, > organizations, representatives and so on: > http://legal-dictionary.thefreedi

> Person as in a legal person. This includes entities like corporations, > organizations, representatives and so on: > http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/person This may be the case for US law ("person" including both individuals and organisations), but it might also not be the case for all countries across the world. For example, Dutch law seems to define "person" as the individual (e.g. you and me) and seems to use a separate term for legal entities and the likes. It's possible that in practise the two are considered the same but I haven't been able to find such an example. Exactly because of this it's better to be explicit. For example, the MPL 2.0 explicitly defines this: > 1.1. "Contributor" > > means each individual or legal entity that creates, contributes to the > creation of, or owns Covered Software. Here the term "contributor" is used, but the same could apply to the term "person". > It tries to. Any change contributed to the project grants permission to > incorporate that change under the same terms of the license, which > includes the patent grant. The patent grant states that any patents owned by the author can be used by the software's users: > and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it However, nowhere is it stated that patents used for contributions automatically belong (or can be used by) the authors and can thus also be used by the users. Defining what "authors" means could clear things up, though you'll probably want to separate the definition from "contributors" since you probably don't want random "contributors" to also be an "author" (this could give them too much power for example). Again the MPL 2.0 is a good example since it does cover this, albeit not in a single place and in a somewhat hard to grok way.