GPL3 and Patents

[Thomas Charron]

On 10/2/07, John Watson <jgw2001 at gmail.com> wrote:
> With virtually thousands of patents, its hard to understand how any business
> can operate in the United States with out the threat of legal action,
> however what I find interesting is the case between  Vonage and Verizon.  To
> my knowledge both of these companies use  the gpl licenced "Asterisk" as a
> VOIP backend with Linux as the operating system.  However Verizon is suing
> Vonage for VOIP patent infringement technology which is used with in
> asterisk.
> Now with GPLv3 released with its patent clause would Verizon be in violation
> of GPLv3?

  What makes you believe that Verizon uses Asterisk as a backend?  I
can honestly say there is no way in hell they would be using Asterisk
for trunking VoIP traffic onto the telephony network.  It just wasn't
built for that, and there are many hardware based solutions which they
could use to do exactly that.  But I digress.

  As far as violation, it really wouldn't be.  Vonage would perhaps
have a DEFENSE that they where granted a license VIA the GPL v3,
however, generally the GPLv3 is based on the use of the patent
specific to the implementation provided, or a derivative of it.

"Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free
patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to
make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and
propagate the contents of its contributor version."

-- 
-- Thomas