ietf-dkim
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Re: [ietf-dkim] IPR disclosures, was Collecting re-chartering questions

2010-01-25 14:15:53
On Jan 25, 2010, at 10:55 AM, John R. Levine wrote:

You understand this stuff far better than I. I'm not even sure of what it 
might mean to license a /patent/ under the GPL (perhaps it means that any 
implementation released under the GPL is automatically licensed?)

There's no such thing as a GPL patent license.  The FSF has a longstanding 
anti-patent policy, after all.

What would be the advantage
to anyone of demanding license changes for obsolete code?

Yes, http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/license/patentlicense1-2.html looks 
obsolete, because its header title doesn't match the one in the body, and 
because its authoritative link doesn't work. However, the patent itself 
doesn't seem obsolete to me.

The IPR refers to both the GPL and the patent license.  The patent license 
is fine, the typo in the header and the dead link have been there for four 
years and aren't important, since this is a document for lawyers to read, 
not code.  Really, the GPL only refers to the Sourceforge code, and nobody 
cares about that.  We should advance DKIM to draft standard now.

The patent license does not apply to DKIM, though. It very explicitly only 
applies
to implementations of one particular version of DomainKeys, unless I'm
misreading it.

Given that (and the GPL silliness) any DKIM implementation using Yahoo
IP is doing so without permission, AIUI. I don't think this is an actual 
problem,
as the last thing Yahoo is going to do is go out and enforce it, but just 
brushing
the issue under the carpet doesn't seem the right thing to do.

(I've not read the Yahoo patent, so I'm only presuming they apply to DKIM -
but given DKIM is mostly just DK with a fix or two and some peripheral extras
added, I'm guessing it does).

Cheers,
 Steve

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