
Ask HN: Could a “Patent Clause” Be Added to Open Source Licenses - bdavisx
Could a clause be added to Open Source licenses saying something like: &quot;Any software that uses this library agrees to assign any patents arising out of software to the Public Domain&quot; (obviously more legalese required here). Also for something like servers: &quot;This software may not be used to host any content that is covered by a non-public domain patent.&quot;<p>Would this be feasible?
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cyphar
Your first condition is already in licenses like the Apache 2.0, GPLv3 and
several other licenses. However, it isn't a requirement that "the patents are
in the public domain" (mainly because such a requirement doesn't make sense,
the public domain is a term used in copyright law to refer to a work with no
copyright, it has _nothing_ to do with patent law). Rather, it states that all
contributors grant a "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-
free, irrevocable" patent license to any other user of the software, provided
that they do not attempt to sue a user for infringement of patents that were
granted under that license.

Your second condition would make the license a proprietary licence (it
violates freedom #0: the right to run the program as you wish without
restriction). In addition, I'm not sure that it would enforcible with current
copyright law (similar to the provisions in the AGPL), since I'm not sure you
can argue that input data to a program is something that you could restrict in
law (and if it's free software, the end user can modify it to allow you to
break that rule). And it would also be a minefield (what if something _could_
be patentable, or is patented by someone other than the person who distributed
it, what if the patent holder gave a patent grant to the rest of humanity, how
many requirements are there for such a grant in order for it to be allowed,
etc).

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lindenksv85
I think that such a provision would be even more unpalatable to the business
world than copy left provisions that risk the user having to release their
product under the same OSS license. I don't see any proprietary software
company ever using anything like this in their code base.ehy would you do this
and leave yourself open to suits from the likes of oracle and Microsoft? So
long as they have their Arsenal of patents, you need yours, regardless of home
much you hate software patents.

The second provision isn't just unpalatable, it's dead in the water. Lots of
SaaS companies host anything and everything without knowing what they host -
think Dropbox. Even if they wanted to comply with this provision it would
require someone poring over everything submitted by a customer and making the
determination of whether or not a patent might apply isn't a determination
even an army of lawyers could confidently make.mforther with more and more
companies getting encrypted data from customers, this is even more impossible
to comply with.

