Constitutional affairs legal affairs

Workshop: Legal aspects of free and open source software 
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software, namely software distributed as such and made to work in general purposes PC, 
not being embedded or as a component of any special purpose machine or apparatus. 
This is not the place for a full discussion of how this practice seems to be illegal and directly 
against the Convention – or simply nonsensical and detrimental. Let us just assume that 
the practice is effective and patents can be enforced against pure software distribution. 
Exclusionary rights conferred by patents can be  used  by  patent  holders  to  stop  or  impair 
distribution of software, through legal means or other kind of impending threats.
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This is also not the place to discuss how – as matter of fact, and as it is a common way of 
saying – the issued patents on software are more likely to “patent the problem” itself rather 
than a solution to a problem, are overreaching and poorly described. But it is common 
experience that it is almost impossible to find which patent is relevant to which piece of 
software, because of how patents are issued and the language which is used and their 
breadth of scope, as well as – or perhaps mainly – the nature of software. 
5.1.1 
Patents are enemies of Free Software 
The very existence of software patents is negative and in conflict with Free Software. 
Under copyright, as it is commonly interpreted, the authors of an original work are almost 
sure that the copyright is only their own. If they reuse software coming from other sources, 
they can safely rely on the inbound license and if the license is a Free Software one and 
compatible with the outbound license of their software, they can assume they are not 
trespassing on anybody else's copyright. 
Under patents, neither of these two tests (originality, compatibility) is likely to be sufficient 
or passed.  

 
Copyright  covers the implementation of an idea, so if two independent authors 
come to the same clever idea, they will very likely have different code, unless one 
copies from the other. Patents cover the idea itself, so if one of the authors above 
is granted patent protection, the other cannot use their own code, unless a separate 
patent license is obtained. 

 
Most of patent licensing schemes have conditions that are directly in contrast with 
the very working of Free Software. One for all, the running royalties contradict the 
freedom to make copies and to distribute them. The very obligation to report sales 
requires that distribution is controlled, which is per se contrary to the basic 
Freedoms. Only very broad “patent promises”, frequently construed as “covenant 
not to sue” can be considered compatible schemes. 
Frequent objections to these arguments use some of the following arguments. The first is 
that the other software developer can “invent around”, so that their software is made in a 
different way that does not infringe the patent. This is true, of course, in theory, but the 
objection does not take into consideration that patents are most often too broad and, 
because they mainly “protect the problem rather than the solution”, any other solution to 
the same problem would also be an infringement. Moreover, inventing around is precisely 
impossible when the patented invention is enshrined in standards. If this is the case, it is 
almost assuredly impossible to comply with the standard and avoid the patent. The 
common parlance is that the patents are “necessarily infringed”. Only Royalty Free 
standards (or more precisely, standards whose implementation does not require per-copy 
royalties, or “running royalties”, provided that the license does not impose other 
incompatible conditions) are compatible with Free Software and thus can truly be 
considered “Open Standards”. Running royalty-bearing RAND
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  and  FRAND
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 conditions 
(at least as they are interpreted by most of patent holders), frequently associated with the 
“open standard” term, are impossible to be made compatible with Free Software. 
                                                 
73 Such as a practice known as “patent FUD”, from FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, a marketing technique which 
is well described in 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
. This practice basically consists in 
forcing competitors and/or users of competing technology to enter into a licensing agreement or to stop using the 
competing technology by implying that contesting even unspecified threats of litigation will be unreasonable and 
anti-economic.  
74  Reasonable And Non Discriminatory 
75  Fair Reasonable And Non Discriminatory 

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Policy Department C: Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs 
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The most frequent rebuttal to the above is perhaps that the patented part can be 
embedded into a proprietary, patent-license-compliant part, which can be used to 
implement the function, while the rest remains Free Software, via an intermediate layer of 
software that keeps the two bits at arm's length. This process is referred to as 
“shimming”. Another way to achieve similar results is using “plugins” into a modular 
system. While this is indeed possible and a used workaround, it is very likely to create an 
unnecessary additional complexity on the one hand, and on the other hand it only allows 
making Free Software that consumes the result of implementations of the standard, but 
that does not implement the standard. It is Free Software that makes use of proprietary 
software. The consequence is that, the more patent-ridden standards come into existence, 
the more the breathing space for Free Software shrinks. 
Proprietary software “used” by Free Software cannot even be distributed in the same way 
as Free Software, or under an overall Free Software license, but needs to be acquired 
separately by each and any of the recipients of Free Software, which is therefore heavily 
crippled or deprived of much of its beneficial effects. 
5.1.2 
Patent provisions in Free Software licenses 
As soon as the issue of software patent became a real nuisance, new licenses started to 
tackle the problem with certain provisions to ensure that what is given with the “copyright 
license” is not taken away with the use of the patent. 
The most common provisions are: 

 
patent retaliation clauses (or termination clauses); 

 
implied or express patent licensing clauses. 
A patent retaliation clause simply terminates the Free Software license in case the licensee 
uses the patent to claim exclusionary rights against the covered software. So if A receives 
software X from B under a license that contains the termination clause, and distributes it 
(or a modified version thereof) and at the same time A requires B or any other recipient to 
receive a separate license on the patents A claims on the same software X, B, as copyright 
holder of X, can terminate the license, so that A becomes an infringer on B's copyright. 
The implied or express license works on a different level. If A receives software X from B 
and distributes it (or a modified version thereof), all recipients from A will receive a license 
on the patents controlled by A that are relevant to X, so that if A were to claim patent 
rights over X, B and all others could claim that they are already licensees for them.  
The express license can come under two species:  

 
the license only covers the additions made by the patent holder (this is the case of 
MPL), so that modifications made by others do not trigger a license on patents that the 
contributor owns and that read on parts of the software that the same contributor has 
not modified; 

 
the license covers all patents that read on distributed code, regardless whether 
contributed by the patent holder or just received and distributed without modifications 
(this is the case of GPL v.3) 
In no known cases is the express patent license triggered by modifications made by third 
parties where said modifications are not distributed by the patent holder. 
5.2 Trademarks 
Trademarks are used to identify a product or service, and/or their provenance, with a 
name, a symbol or other signs, so that their identity is readily established and recognized 
by the public. A trademark, however, is not necessarily associated to a Free Software 
product. If the software is maintained by a group of developers or a foundation, the name 
under which it is distributed can be claimed as being a de facto trademark, or a common 
law trademark under certain jurisdictions. This is important when forks occur, and a clash 
between the original group and the forking group (or other entity that can claim the use of 
the sign) can occur. In other cases, the entity behind the software development registers 

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