[copyleft-next] copyleft-next patent commons?

Mike Linksvayer ml at gondwanaland.com
Fri Feb 22 19:50:34 UTC 2013


On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 9:42 AM, Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:
> One possible issue is how this would interact with the "safety valve"
> clause which allows relicensing under GPL 2 or 3. Could a company using
> copyleft-next software simply say "I'm using it all under GPL 3; my
> rights remain intact"? Could they do that even after this provision
> triggered?

Notwithstanding feasibility (such as raised by Pam just now; I'm
wholly unqualified to comment), I love the idea.

The obvious way to deal with relicensing is to expand "this License" in

>     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.

to include any license this license may be relicensed as (so any GPL
work), or even this license or any OSD-compliant (how determined
already must be dealt with for proprietary relicensing nullification)
license. So if you litigate over patents in free software at all, you
lose your rights.

This reminds me of a free software criticism I've heard of the
"Defensive Patent License" idea, which is that it doesn't carve out
protection for all free software developers, only those part of DPL
pool, which (remains to be seen if idea realized) could involve
hurdles to join. To extent copyleft-next successfully implements idea
and is adopted, or other free software licenses copy implementation,
free software developers would gain some incremental protection, at
least a bit more than they're getting now with effective "pool"
limited to particular works.

> That's not quite the same. MPL 1.1 section 8.2 b) provides that you can
> lose rights to use the Modifications of a contributor to an MPLed work
> if you launch patent litigation against them about _anything_.
>
> So if megacorps ABC and DEF were collaborating on project Foo, and a
> random subsidiary of ABC sued another random subsidiary of DEF about a
> patent on the unrelated Bar widget, then ABC would lose their rights to
> DEF's bits of Foo. This causes action-at-a-distance - said warring
> subsidiaries may have no idea what they just did, as their lawsuit had
> nothing to do with the MPL and they may never have heard of it.

I suppose this criticism applies to some extent to any expansion of
pool beyond just copyleft-next works.

Still, I like it. Heck, I like MPL 1.1's approach, which I did not
fully understand before. Has MPL 1.1 termination ever actually come up
in patent litigation?

Mike


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