[legal] Comments on copyright license in the proposed IPR policy

[Gabe Wachob]

Copyright does not cover ideas. Therefore, any copyright license would not
deal with the right to implement. When it comes to copyright, we're merely
talking about the text of the document(s) itself (the "expression"). 

Patent, which covers use of the "ideas" (and therefore implementations of
the spec) is a whole other ball of wax, and makes the whole IPR policy and
process necessary. 

	-Gabe

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Wahl [mailto:Mark.Wahl at informed-control.com]
> Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 1:29 PM
> To: Gabe Wachob
> Cc: 'Simon Josefsson'; legal at openid.net
> Subject: Re: [legal] Comments on copyright license in the proposed IPR
> policy
> 
> Gabe Wachob wrote:
> 
> > I rather like the idea of one of the Creative Commons copyright licenses
> > because it expresses the intent directly and we don't have to dicker
> with
> > details.
>  >
> > The Attribution-NonCommercial, seems is best appropriate, probably also
> with
> > ShareAlike. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ or
> > http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ )
> 
> I would have thought that using a CC license other than "Attribution"
> (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) for an OpenID specification
> might lead one to need to "dicker with the details" in order to make clear
> why "use of this work for commercial purposes" or "build upon this work"
> without "permission from the copyright holder" is forbidden for an entity
> that wishes to, for example,
>   implement an OpenID specification within commercial software, or
>   extend OpenID with additional specifications/profiles for their
> community,
> or the procedure by which such an entity would obtain permission from the
> copyright holder(s) in order to obtain the rights to perform the above two
> tasks.
> 
> Mark Wahl
> Informed Control Inc.