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cc-licenses - Re: CC & other forms of IP -- puzzled

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Johannes Ernst <jernst AT netmesh.us>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: CC & other forms of IP -- puzzled
  • Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2004 19:23:14 -0800

Well, take an OSI-approved license that explicitly talks about it: http://opensource.org/licenses/sunpublic.php, section 2.1: ".. grants ... under Patent Claims ...".

Not being a lawyer, I should better not have an opinion on the licenses that do not talk about. However, I recently listened to a panel of lawyers discussing open source licensing where one of them argued (admittedly I think he worked for MSFT, and I hope I'm paraphrasing him correctly) that any piece of software licensed through GPL licenses not only the patents used by the software in its released version, but also all other patents the original contributor may own that (get this!) any other party later uses by modifying the GPL'd code even without further involvement of the original contributor. In other words, if you have a patent on encryption and decide to license your encryption code under GPL, and if I later add a light bulb to it (assuming you also have the patent for the lightbulb), according to this interpretation you would have licensed to me the lightbulb patent as well by virtue of having licensed the original code that had nothing to do with a lightbulb. Other lawyers seemed to disagree with this extremely sweeping interpretation, but it seems clear that at least some patent rights are being licensed when using open source licenses.

So I'm asking what exactly do CC licenses do in that respect?

The gray areas seem to be more about patents than trademarks or other IP rights.

On Dec 27, 2004, at 15:13, Branko Collin wrote:

On 27 Dec 2004, at 14:45, Johannes Ernst wrote:

On the other hand, open source licenses for software seem to be
commonly interpreted as granting not only a license under copyright
(e.g. "you may copy-paste this subroutine") but also under patent law
(e.g. "you may do a clean-room implementation").

Could you give an example of such a license? This is the first I hear
of them.

--
branko collin
collin AT xs4all.nl
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