James Governor's Monkchips

w00t: IBM offers patent protection covenant for ATOM IP

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Another reason to choose ATOM, via James Snell. Microsoft’s RSS extensions may be creativecommons licensed, but as I understand it they could be encumbered by icky software patent cruft. I heart patent covenants.

3 comments

  1. […] Update: Coverage here, here, and here […]

  2. James,

    Just wanted to point out that Microsoft’s RSS extensions are made available under a Creative Commons license for copyright and a royalty free license for necessary patent claims.

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse/

    “Microsoft’s copyrights in this specification are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5). To view a copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/. As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification’s extensions. If Microsoft later becomes aware of any such necessary patent claims, Microsoft also agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to any such patent claims for the purpose of publishing and consuming the extensions set out in the specification.”

  3. It really impresses me how much Microsoft’s legal battles are expanding US Patent case law. The US Patent System is far from perfect, but, the basic principles need to remain in order to provide incentive to innovate for both large corporations and individuals. Looking forward to more posts. Thanks, Eric

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