Quoting Prashant Shah (pshah.mum...@gmail.com): > CC0 explicitly states that it doesn't grant patent rights if there are > any. Is this not going against the purpose of putting the work in > public domain itself ?
In general, the focus of Creative Commons licences has been on maximising the possibilities for reuse and remix of cultural works. (Small reminder: CC's focus isn't software.) Towards that end, they publish a spectrum of license that within software we would classify as variously free / open source or proprietary, the apparent aim being to coax copyright stakeholders with differing (but sometimes large) degrees of insistence on ongoing control to nonetheless permit reuse / remix of their cultural works by others under one CC licensing option or another. As an additional reminder, copyright encumbers the particular expression of a creative work in one of the statutory covered categories. Patent, by contrast, encumbers a useful practical technique or process. It's by no means obvious that exercising rights normally reserved to the owner of a copyrighted creative expression necessarily infringes any patent. (Looks to me like those concerns are largely orthogonal.) Anyway, back to CC: I would speculate that the wording of the CC0 dedication + fallback permissive licence is the way it is -- including its avoidance of the patent morass -- specifically because of CC's guiding star of trying to coax copyright stakeholders of all types into permitting reuse / remix. Purporting to require them to also throw in a bunch of patent rights would, from that perspective, reduce the appeal of their various licence options. However, the fact that I'm speculating highlights one of your larger problems in all of this: You are not (as far as I know) addressing your concerns to Creative Commons. I don't speak for them any more than I do for OSI, but, FWIW, from my acquaintance with the CC folks and observing their high level of competence, I would tend to think that if you ever conclude that their licences fail to advance their goals, the first qwestion you should ask yourself is whether you understand their goals. That aside, I notice that _many_ people trying to promote 'public domain dedications' (present company excluded) just are seeking magic tools to make legal impediments go away, and aren't interested in complex realities like, e.g., Unlicense being badly written and legally defective. For those folks, I tend to just quote Miracle Max: 'Have fun storming the castle.' -- Cheers, "Two women walk into a bar and discuss the Bechdel Test." Rick Moen -- Matt Watson r...@linuxmafia.com McQ! (4x80) _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss