[copyleft-next] copyleft-next patent commons?

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Fri Feb 22 17:25:46 UTC 2013


On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 04:50:54PM +0000, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Again, forgive me if this has been discussed before...
> 
> Has the group considered the pros and cons of changing section 10), para
> b), to cover all copyleft-nexted works? 

AFAICR this has not been suggested before.

> So:
> 
> 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 this License directly or indirectly
>        infringes any patent.
> 
> In other words, if you sue someone over a patent in a copyleft-nexted
> work, you lose rights to use all copyleft-nexted works. As
> copyleft-nexted 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.

Right. 

The proposed change seems to be similar to provisions that were, in
the admittedly distant past, criticized when they appeared in some
open source licenses. MPL 1.1 comes to mind. :) (If I recall
correctly, MPL 2.0 takes a more conservative approach.) On the other
hand, over the past couple of years I've seen some signs that the
underlying policy might be better received today by some
patent-holding companies, though perhaps implemented through
mechanisms external to a FLOSS license.

Anyway, this is certainly worth thinking about further.

 - RF



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