On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 01:54:53PM +0200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
Ted,
Well, if IPR owners don't actually care, why are they asking people to
send a postcard? It would seem to be an unnecessary administrative
burden for the IPR owners, yes?
My assumption is that they care if the party that fails to send
a postcard is one of their competitors. That's what the defensive
clauses in these licenses are all about, afaics.
I was thinking about your response, and I wonder if we might be
talking past each other. The concern that I think a number of raising
about "send a postcard" specifically about patent licenses which are
not sub-licensable, so that each individual end-user has to request
their own individual patent license.
Were you perhaps thinking of the scenario where only the a developer
had to do is to send a postcard to request a patent license? If so, I
agree that's much less of an issue, although it still could
potentially be considered too onerous by some.
We could construct some really extreme ways such a "Royalty Free"
license could be worded that illustrates how our lack of definition of
"Royalty Free" in the IPR disclosure template could come back to haunt
us. Suppose a company declared that they would make a "Royalty Free"
license available. If they subsequently published the the following,
at which point would it be construed that they had violated the IPR
declaration (of which I hope some lawyer has commented about whether
or not it is legally binding)?
"This patent license is not sub-licensable. Each developer
and individual end user must travel in person to the MegaCorp
offices located in Nome, Alaska, and apply for a royalty-free
patent license, which shall not be refused unless you or your
company has ever used or developed software which utilizes the
Open Document format."
If the answer is that a company could declare in an IPR declaration
that they are offerring an Royalty Free license, and not make any
promises for offerring RAND terms, and then could offer their patent
under the above license without sufferring any legal consequences, I'd
argue we have a significant hole in our processes.
- Ted
Disclaimer: These are my own personal opinions and not necessarily the
opinions of my employer; I'm not important enough to affect the
opinions of my employer. :-)
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