Glenn Maynard wrote: > Ick. A, B, C, X, VD, MSC, π. I find these hypotheticals to be a lot > easier to parse and process if I give these people names and use actual > projects to put things in perspective with one another ... > > On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 03:08:04PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: >> (Essentially, by buying the copyright, they would have gotten themselves >> a special license to avoid the patent-termination clause, and that's >> all.) > > However, the question is if the patent grant is intrinsic to these patent > defense clauses being free. > > Without a patent license grant, if John writes GIFEnc, and holds a GIF > patent, he can distribute GIFEnc under a patent-defense license, and then > sue users of > it for violating his GIF patent. Those users can't as easily countersue > by claiming that GIFEnc also violates their own GIF patent, because > they'll lose their license to it. > > With the patent grant, John can't sue for that patent violation--or if he > does, users have a trivial defense (he granted them a license). > > Is the first case free? If you think so, the copyright-transfer case is > irrelevant. Hmm. No, the first case is non-free.
However, if he distributed under a non-patent-defense license, it would *still* be non-free. So I'm not clear on how the so-called patent-defence clause makes any difference here. > I'm inclined to say it's not. I'll agree not to sue you for patent > violation for a license to this software, but only if it's mutual--don't > give me a copyright license and then turn around and sue me for patent > violation. I'm not going to give up my ability to countersue unless you > agree to make it unnecessary. > > Now, I can still be sued by GIFCorp for patent violation. They'll lose > their license to GIFEnc, but they may not care. In that case, I won't be > able to sue them for violations due to their use of GIFEnc--they don't > even use GIFEnc. > > So the case in question is: GIFCorp has bought GIFEnc and uses it heavily, > and sues me for violating their own GIF patents (which the origial patent > grant didn't include). They do use GIFEnc, but I can't countersue for > their violations in that use--I'll lose my license. We're back to the > above "without a patent license grant" case. Right.... but if the patent-defence clause is absent, then either: (1) GIFEnc is still free, because GIFCorp's patents will be defeated (In which case what's the need for the countersuit?) Or (2) GIFEnc isn't free So what difference does the patent-defence clause make? You are convincing me that patent license grants are a necessary component of *all* licenses, not just patent-defence licenses. :-) -- This space intentionally left blank.