3 ms·
Not a lawyer but: is there any case law in which the act of open-source licensing in a not-explicitly-retaining-patent-rights way was found to be a de facto, or
by btown 4y ago
Not a lawyer but: is there any case law in which the act of open-source licensing in a not-explicitly-retaining-patent-rights way was found to be a de facto, or implied, waiver of patent rights? https://patentdefenses.klarquist.com/waiver/ https://patentdefenses.klarquist.com/waiver/ points out some situations in which one could implicitly waive patent rights, but specifically in the context of lying to standards-setting organizations, it would seem?
If a license has never been considered an implicit waiver, it seems overkill to say that "a license that says nothing about rights is materially better than a license that explicitly does not waive rights," no?
- msbarnett 4y ago> If a license has never been considered an implicit waiver, it seems overkill to say that "a license that says nothing about rights is materially better than a license that explicitly does not waive rights," no? Yes, and I suspect a lawyer for a sufficiently-malicious GPLv2 dev looking to submarine an org could probably even take it further – because the FSF felt it was necessary to create GPLv3 in order to explicitly grant patent rights to GPLv3 licensors of the code, choosing to continue to use GPLv2 like my client the malicious-submarine-dev did, instead of relicensing in GPLv3, was done precisely in order to signal that they are expressly choosing to grant a copyright license but not a patent license to users. Singling out CC0 seems arbitrary – if Fedora wants patent certainty, they should be sticking to things like GPLv3 and Apache