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Law Professors Developing Patent License For FOSS

Posted by Soulskill on from the necessary-evil dept.

Julie188 writes with this quote from a Networkworld article: "Two law professors from UC Berkeley have come up with a novel idea to protect open source developers from patent bullies. They call it the Defensive Patent License. They hope the DPL can address the objections FOSS developers have with patents the way the GPL addressed them for copyright. The DPL is similar to the concept of a defensive patent pool, but is not the same. The DPL is a bit more radical. It requires a bigger commitment from its members than the typical toe-in-the-water kind of pool, says Jason Schultz, former staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'The perception is that bigger companies only commit their least-effective, least-important patents to a patent pool,' he says. Schultz isn't pointing fingers at any particular pool. However critics of IBM's open source patent pledge often said it didn't cover the patents most relevant to the FOSS community."

7 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Mutual Defense Against Software Patents by _|()|\| · · Score: 4, Informative

    The League for Programming Freedom advocated something like this in 1994: "Mutual Defense Against Software Patents."

  2. Re:So is there anything to suggest it'll be popula by dunng808 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I for one throw my support behind "no software patents." To support this plan would be hypocritical.

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    Gary Dunn
    Open Slate Project

  3. More patent conference coverage by Corbet · · Score: 3, Informative

    I, too, was at that conference; my LWN article about it has been up for a week now.

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    Jonathan Corbet, LWN.net
  4. Software patents are wrong... by 3seas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    .. so this effort is nothing more than to sabotage the honesty stand against software patents due to software not being of patent-able matter.

    I'm absolutely certain Richard Stallman would agree.

    Software is provably not patentable.

  5. Public Domain Does It All by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Putting the invention in the public domain by publishing it with the statement "this invention is in the public domain" does everything these "defensive patents" claim to do. It does that without lawyers, without costs, without any doubt that the invention cannot be made a synthetic government-enforced monopoly ("patent").

    Defensive patents are a scam. They are a way to reserve the right to stop someone else from making the invention. The public domain is what they'd do, if they weren't scamming.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  6. Re:Is patenting contradictory to Open Source? by grahammm · · Score: 3, Informative

    But why should a patent be necessary for that? Open Source software, by definition, puts the invention on public record - in considerably more detail and without the obfuscation present in patent claims. Patents are supposed to be for the benefit of 'practitioners in the art', but are in practice written by lawyers in a language foreign to the engineers and inventors. The publishing of the source should satisfy the requirements of 'prior art' so would block anyone from subsequently patenting it. So publishing as open source should provide all of the benefits of a patent without the expense and legal rigmarole of obtaining one.

  7. Not GPL compatible by janwedekind · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The GPL already contains a clause which requires the distributor of GPL software to grant a non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide patent license.
    The article however suggests some kind of club where members use their patents defensively against non-members. That's not going to be effective unless you restrict membership. But I don't see how you can restrict membership without starting to discriminate users and developers of the software.