Implicit patent licence

Posted Sep 30, 2010 22:42 UTC (Thu) by boog (subscriber, #30882)
In reply to: ESP's response by coriordan
Parent article: Red Hat Responds to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Request for Guidance on Bilski

Returning to a previous issue, I realised I am possibly confused as to what is meant by the implicit patent licence of GPLv2.

There are the general sections 6 and 7 requiring a distributor not to impose further limits on the recipients rights (as seen on the ESP wiki).

But I saw somewhere a comment of Stallman's indicating that in the US any sale carries with it an "implicit patent licence", presumably because otherwise a seller could potentially sue their own customers. He further implied that he had been happy for this not be explicit in the GPLv2 (I guess to "ensnare" as many patents as possible). I don't know how useful this would be regarding redistribution, even in the US.

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Implicit patent licence

Posted Sep 30, 2010 23:03 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Below is a quote supporting some of those things. I don't remember him saying that it was better not to be explicit in v2. One think I do remember, but can't find, is that I think he gave the UK as an example of a country where the implied grant wouldn't work or would be narrower.

http://www.fsfe.org/projects/gplv3/tokyo-rms-transcript

"""We didn't think this was an issue because in the US, when that company distributes the software under the GPL, they're telling people "We have no objections if you do what the GPL says you can do" and so if they tried to sue those same people for patent infringement later, they would lose.

However, we found out that this is not true all around the World. So GPL version 3 carries an explicit patent licence which is following the lead of the Mozilla Public License. I think that was the first one which contained an explicit patent licence. Basically, all this says is that none of the people who distributed the program on it's path to reaching you can turn around and sue you for patent infringement on the patents that covered the code that passed through their hands.

This is not as broad as it could possibly be, but it seems right because it's pretty much the same as the implicit patent licence that US law gives people."""