Re: Termination clauses, was: Choice of venue
> Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com> wrote:
> >(If you pointed me to an evidently valid patent which is being infringed, I
> >would say "Get that program out!")
On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 11:34:02AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> You'd be going against Debian policy, then.
In what sense? We've done this with the unisys compression patents.
Or are you saying that our standard isn't so much "obviously valid" but
"obviously likely to cause us legal probems", with some fairly amorphous
concept of "obviously"?
> >In contrast, if the copyright holder declares his right to terminate the
> >license based on a termination clause, there really is no arguing with it.
> >At all. It's not just a lawsuit, it's "give up and go home".
>
> Which is the effective situation we're in with patents.
That's the effective situation we're in with patents for the cases where
there's no explicit clauses in the license to trigger this sort of event.
We tend to reject licenses as non-free when they have explicit "patent"
clauses to trigger these sorts of events.
So, in essense, this becomes an argument that we should treat licenses
as non-free when they have explicit venue clauses and allow them to be
free if they only treat venue implicitly.
However, it's also an argument based on existing practice, which can be
trumped by showing that existing practice is incorrect.
--
Raul
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