IBM frees 500 patents

IBM frees 500 patents

Posted Jan 11, 2005 21:38 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: IBM frees 500 patents by jamesh
Parent article: IBM frees 500 patents

Actions may be separately restricted for multiple reasons. If you are running a BSD-licensed program using rented computer time, your use of the program is restricted both by the license on the program itself and the license to use the computer. This doesn't mean that the program isn't BSD licensed; your license under copyright law to use the program is still the BSD license. But that doesn't mean that your actions aren't restricted by other factors, such as copyright licenses on the content you are acting on with the program, patent grant restrictions, trademark law, and criminal law. You could be scamming people by running a Mozilla-branded version of hotbabe with modified images with alpha blending tunnelled over ssh, and the fact that you're obeying the BSD license on OpenSSH doesn't help your case any.

The effect of this grant is that one of the possible issues beyond copyright you might have in interacting with software isn't a problem with respect to this set of IBM patents provided the software is open source (i.e. the copyright is licensed (to somebody? to you? to IBM? have to check on this) under an open-source license).

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