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> Because their licence gave Facebook the upper hand if they wanted to come after you. No it didn't. Facebook made a nothing-up-the-sleeve showing; you had r
by carussell 9y ago
> Because their licence gave Facebook the upper hand if they wanted to come after you.
No it didn't. Facebook made a nothing-up-the-sleeve showing; you had recourse if they decided to "come after you", because your right to countersue was something that was explicitly protected in the PATENTS grant.
Removing the grant, on the other hand, contributes to a world where everyone else can come after you. That should be scarier, because the set containing entities who aren't Facebook is much larger than the set of entities who are. (And the latter set is much less likely to sue—virtually guaranteed not to sue, even—for the exact reason mentioned above.)
- ethbro 9y agoWasn't the issue not "if they come after you" but "if they pirate your tech without suing you"?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Sacho 9y agoWhen you use the loaded term "pirate your tech", you mean "infringe your patents", right? The thing that the clause is trying to neutralize? This is why Facebook's move to neutralize patents failed - everyone's suddenly in love with their own patents, even if they agree that the system is broken. It was a good idea to scrap the clause to prevent the community from fracturing, but there's no triumph here - they failed to convince people that patents were a scourge to be eliminated.
- ethbro 9y agoIf that was Facebook's intent, they could have worded their license in a more reciprocal way. "We grant you a right to use all patents we have covering this work. [1] If you sue us regarding a patent you claim covers this work, we revoke your right to use all patents we hold covering this work. [2] If we sue you regarding an unrelated patent, you retain your right to use patents covering this work for purposes of this work. [3] If you sue us regarding an unrelated patent, you retain your right to use patents covering this work for purposes of this work." The entire point of people being annoyed about this is that Facebook specifically didn't include the [3] grant. Consequently, this was more about Facebook attempting to use React's popularity to make themselves immune to patent litigation (as anyone relying on React wouldn't have been able to sue Facebook for any patent without losing the React patents grants).
- sulam 9y agoI work for a company with at least one lawyer dedicated to IP law and we thought about this long and hard. What it does is potentially make t prohibitive to sue FB if they violate our patents. Since we have hardware patents and they have hardware, it was distinctly possible that this could be a real problem. We decided to proceed anyway but we know we are risking something. And you can say patents suck and we shouldn’t have them, but our hardware patents represent decades of R&D that wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have patent protection.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- unscaled 9y agoIf you are not the size of Facebook, suing Facebook for a patent violation will be prohibitive to you, period. http://www.businessinsider.com/just-so-were-clear-facebook-totally-demolished-yahoo-in-the-patent-fight-that-just-ended-2012-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/just-so-were-clear-facebook-t...