I want to try and drive this forward a bit more. Here's another shot at
the wording, including the idea of a patent commons which allows other
licenses to join:
10. Termination
Your license grants under section 1 are automatically terminated if
You
...
b) initiate a patent infringement litigation claim (excluding
declaratory judgment actions, counterclaims, and cross-claims)
alleging that any work under any version of a license with
a clause identical in effect to this one
directly or indirectly infringes any patent.
It would be possible to relicense to the GPLv3 to avoid this clause, but
that would be such a comedy move that I think we should allow it :-)
Scylla and Charybdis...
I've left out the idea of "labelled patent commonses" for now. There's
only one. I say "identical in effect" because the clause needs to have
the reciprocity in it, but we have to allow for e.g. licenses written in
other languages. If "identical" is too strong, suggest other words.
Rationale:
If you sue someone over a patent in a work with this "patent commons"
clause, you lose rights to use all works under licenses which use the
commons.
As such works become more common and more useful (say e.g. a
copyleft-nexted work was incorporated into Android) it would become more
and more of a bad idea to sue anyone for patent infringement relating to
such work. After all, in that case, the first thing you'd have to do is
replace all the company Android phones with iPhones...
The potential disadvantage of this, presumably, is the risk that
organizations will be less interested in writing or using
copyleft-nexted works.
We should also get advice on whether Pam's concern about it being a
group boycott is valid.
Gerv