On Fri, 28 May 2004, Meng Weng Wong wrote:
George Webb at Microsoft will meet with the MS attorneys
next week. He has asked for our input.
Since most of us are not lawyers and would just get taken, could we
all donate $50 to a fund to defray expenses for trusted open source
lawyers (say from FSF or EFF) to review what is needed?
I suggest we do some 'license reuse'. This problem has cropped up
lots of times in the IETF. It will crop up a lot more since a lot
of people have been making bogus patent claims on existing specs.
We just litigated one of these, the case was utterly without merit,
we 'won' but it cost millions to defend. This is why Microsoft and
most other companies are now much more aggressive on the patent
front.
There are two basic forms, one is a patent license, the other is
an agreement not to enforce claims - for example see
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/hp-mib
There are a number of issues of concern:
1) Payment, royalty free is necessary but not sufficient?
2) Notice, are products required to provide notice that the invention,
code etc is being used?
3) Notification, are either vendors or users required to notify
the IP holder that they are using the invention? This is a
big issue because it may mean handing over your customer list
to a competitor.
4) Term, can the license be revoked?
In general the form of the grant is that anyone can use the invention
provided that they do not attempt to assert a patent claim against
the owner in respect of the same specification.
This is actually a pretty good condition because it encourages
other IP owners to release their claims.
I would suggest pinging larry lessig.