since it's my article, I'll strengthen the case for "yes". I won't get into contract vs licence because that's also highly controversial, but I can argue witho

since it's my article, I'll strengthen the case for "yes". I won't get into contract vs licence because that's also highly controversial, but I can argue without settling that. The question you're asking is how the unexhausted patent right to exclude manufacture interacts with the copyright rights to reproduce (copy) and derive. I made a couple of arguments for this in the article, but I think the strongest one is public policy. If you can restrict copying and derivation using the patent right to restrict manufacture then we have a huge problem in the copyright ecosystem because patents have no fair use doctrine. That means every copy you make, including from your software disk to your hard drive and every time you load the bits from your hard drive into memory requires a new permission to manufacture under the patent. That gives patent holders carte blanche to hold software purchasers to ransom. This would be a huge disruption to an existing area of well settled law. The same goes for the copyright right to derive. If that requires a patent licence, then even after I licence a patent for some proprietary SW purpose, I'm required to pay again for every change I make, including bug fixes which are some of the most common things software is updated for. Not quite as huge, but still a disruption to a well settled area of law.