Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Sarah Pearson <sarah AT creativecommons.org>]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 3:00 PM, Andrew Rens <andrewrens AT gmail.com> wrote:

1.The mandatory patent grant in the GPL helps to prevent strategic behaviour. Without that requirement a software vendor could licence code under the GPL and wait until it has been incorporated in many other programs and then demand patent licence fees. The requirement for a patent licence prevents that kind of behaviour.

A person licensing non-software under CC By SA cannot make someone else re-license under the GPL and so cannot engage in a strategy of licensing under CC By SA in order to extract patent revenue from users of software or combined works. The incompatibility does not encourage strategic behaviour to the detriment of licensees of the GPLed work.

This is a good point. I think any patent issues created through 1-way compatibility would be created unintentionally rather than strategically.