5 ms·

The issue is that CC0 explicitly reserves trademark and patent rights. Those OSS licenses do not have this issue.

mcherm 4y ago
What is the legal difference between a license with this clause: > No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document. and a license with no clause at all addressing trademark or patent rights? Wouldn't both of those documents leave trademark and patent rights unaffected?
- mlinksva 4y ago
  One analysis https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - slavik81 4y ago
    I particularly like this bit: > The MIT License unquestionably has an express [patent] license. That license is not limited to the granting of any particular flavor of intellectual property rights. The statement of license does not use the word "patent" or the word "copyright." When was the last time you heard someone expressing concern that the MIT License merely had an implied copyright license?
SeanLuke 4y ago
I do not think this is true. CC0 neither reserves nor waives these rights: instead it just says that the CC0 license (when it says "this document" it's referring to the license, not the licensed material) does not surrender any of these rights. This doesn't introduce anything new at all: it is effectively a reminder to the licensee. MIT, BSD, and GPL 2.0 also do not surrender those rights. They just don't helpfully remind the licensee of this fact in the body of the license itself. The net result is, so far as I can tell, the same. It would seem to me that the complaint is with a license which doesn't surrender rights, particularly patent rights. I think this is proper: MIT, BSD, and GPL 2.0 are awful licenses for exactly this reason. *Edit* A quick mention of MIT. There are people who argue that MIT's "without restriction" clause sort of acts as a patent release. As if that was good. MIT is a bad license because a critical feature of a modern license -- a patent release -- hinges on a strained interpretation of a vague, easily misconstrued statement, and one which was clearly not the intention of the original license authors. A good license would have explicitly spelled things out. It takes just one judge to grind the MIT license into dirt.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Patent grants don't seem like they're worth much anyway. They don't stop a third party from coming along and suing you and the original developer for supposedly violating some patent neither of you knew ever existed. And isn't that how all patent trolling plays out? I've never heard of a patent troll that starts out with the troll giving you CC0 licensed code and waiting for you to trip over the patents they neglected to mention earlier.
- slavik81 4y ago
  The MIT license plainly says I am allowed to use the software without restriction. The portion of the license that grants permission is: > Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software It doesn't say anything about copyright or patents. It merely provides a list of things that I am allowed to do. To decide that they haven't granted all rights required to use the software would seem to contradict what was written in the license.
chrismorgan 4y ago
Not so much reserves as declares out of scope. CC0 is a public domain dedication, with fallback license for jurisdictions where public domain dedication is not possible. The public domain dedication part is not a license (this was a large part of the legal criticism of the awfully-named Unlicense: that it tried to be both a public domain dedication and a license, despite the two being incompatible), and so cannot do anything with trademark or patent rights. If you want to cover trademark or patent rights, you’ll have to use a public-domain-equivalent license instead of a public domain dedication. This is where things like 0BSD come in. (With this latest thing, I think I’m going to change my primary recommendation in https://chrismorgan.info/blog/unlicense/ https://chrismorgan.info/blog/unlicense/ to 0BSD rather than CC0.)

What is the legal difference between a license with this clause: > No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document. and a license with no clause at all addressing trademark or patent rights? Wouldn't both of those documents leave trademark and patent rights unaffected?

mlinksva 4y ago
One analysis https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- slavik81 4y ago
  I particularly like this bit: > The MIT License unquestionably has an express [patent] license. That license is not limited to the granting of any particular flavor of intellectual property rights. The statement of license does not use the word "patent" or the word "copyright." When was the last time you heard someone expressing concern that the MIT License merely had an implied copyright license?

SeanLuke 4y ago

I do not think this is true. CC0 neither reserves nor waives these rights: instead it just says that the CC0 license (when it says "this document" it's referring to the license, not the licensed material) does not surrender any of these rights. This doesn't introduce anything new at all: it is effectively a reminder to the licensee. MIT, BSD, and GPL 2.0 also do not surrender those rights. They just don't helpfully remind the licensee of this fact in the body of the license itself. The net result is, so far as I can tell, the same. It would seem to me that the complaint is with a license which doesn't surrender rights, particularly patent rights. I think this is proper: MIT, BSD, and GPL 2.0 are awful licenses for exactly this reason. *Edit* A quick mention of MIT. There are people who argue that MIT's "without restriction" clause sort of acts as a patent release. As if that was good. MIT is a bad license because a critical feature of a modern license -- a patent release -- hinges on a strained interpretation of a vague, easily misconstrued statement, and one which was clearly not the intention of the original license authors. A good license would have explicitly spelled things out. It takes just one judge to grind the MIT license into dirt.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
Patent grants don't seem like they're worth much anyway. They don't stop a third party from coming along and suing you and the original developer for supposedly violating some patent neither of you knew ever existed. And isn't that how all patent trolling plays out? I've never heard of a patent troll that starts out with the troll giving you CC0 licensed code and waiting for you to trip over the patents they neglected to mention earlier.
slavik81 4y ago
The MIT license plainly says I am allowed to use the software without restriction. The portion of the license that grants permission is: > Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software It doesn't say anything about copyright or patents. It merely provides a list of things that I am allowed to do. To decide that they haven't granted all rights required to use the software would seem to contradict what was written in the license.

chrismorgan 4y ago

Not so much reserves as declares out of scope. CC0 is a public domain dedication, with fallback license for jurisdictions where public domain dedication is not possible. The public domain dedication part is not a license (this was a large part of the legal criticism of the awfully-named Unlicense: that it tried to be both a public domain dedication and a license, despite the two being incompatible), and so cannot do anything with trademark or patent rights. If you want to cover trademark or patent rights, you’ll have to use a public-domain-equivalent license instead of a public domain dedication. This is where things like 0BSD come in. (With this latest thing, I think I’m going to change my primary recommendation in https://chrismorgan.info/blog/unlicense/ https://chrismorgan.info/blog/unlicense/ to 0BSD rather than CC0.)