Ick. A, B, C, X, VD, MSC, π. I find these hypotheticals to be a lot easier to parse and process if I give these people names and use actual projects to put things in perspective with one another ...
On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 03:08:04PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: > (Essentially, by buying the copyright, they would have gotten themselves a > special license to avoid the patent-termination clause, and that's all.) However, the question is if the patent grant is intrinsic to these patent defense clauses being free. Without a patent license grant, if John writes GIFEnc, and holds a GIF patent, he can distribute GIFEnc under a patent-defense license, and then sue users of it for violating his GIF patent. Those users can't as easily countersue by claiming that GIFEnc also violates their own GIF patent, because they'll lose their license to it. With the patent grant, John can't sue for that patent violation--or if he does, users have a trivial defense (he granted them a license). Is the first case free? If you think so, the copyright-transfer case is irrelevant. I'm inclined to say it's not. I'll agree not to sue you for patent violation for a license to this software, but only if it's mutual--don't give me a copyright license and then turn around and sue me for patent violation. I'm not going to give up my ability to countersue unless you agree to make it unnecessary. Now, I can still be sued by GIFCorp for patent violation. They'll lose their license to GIFEnc, but they may not care. In that case, I won't be able to sue them for violations due to their use of GIFEnc--they don't even use GIFEnc. So the case in question is: GIFCorp has bought GIFEnc and uses it heavily, and sues me for violating their own GIF patents (which the origial patent grant didn't include). They do use GIFEnc, but I can't countersue for their violations in that use--I'll lose my license. We're back to the above "without a patent license grant" case. -- Glenn Maynard
