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Formal IPR Policy

Page history last edited by Chris Messina 15 years, 3 months ago

Introduction

This OpenID Intellectual Property Rights Policy (“Policy”) defines the intellectual property rights and obligations of Contributors (as defined below) and certain procedures relating to Contributions (as defined below) to OpenID.

Definitions

  1. “Compliant Portions” means those specific portions of a product (hardware, software or combinations thereof) that implement and are compliant with all relevant portions of an OpenID Specification, provided, and only to the extent that, such portions are within the Scope.
  2. “Contributions” mean any communication to or through the OpenID email reflector or in any face to face meeting of participants that are intended and ultimately are included in an OpenID Specification, or any delivery or inclusion of any text or other material into an OpenID Specification.
  3. “Contributor” means a person who makes a Contribution and shall include their employer or other person or entity to whom that person owes a duty with respect to their participation in OpenID activities.
  4. “Final Specification” means the final version and contents of a Specification that has been deemed final by OpenID. For purposes of this definition, a Final Specification shall not include any implementation examples or reference implementations.
  5. “Implementation” means a product or service that consists of (or makes use of) one or more Compliant Portions.
  6. “Implementer” means a person or other entity that creates, distributes or offers a service that contains or makes use of an Implementation.
  7. “Necessary Claims” means claims of any patent or patent application, other than design patents and design registrations, in any jurisdiction in the world (i) for which a Contributor and/or an Implementer has the right, at any time when this Policy is effective, to grant licenses of the nature granted herein without such grant resulting in payment or royalties or other consideration to third parties (except for payments to Related Entities or employees); (ii) that are necessarily infringed by an implementation consisting of one or more Compliant Portions of a particular Final Specification; and (iii) that are within the Scope at the time such Final Specification is/was deemed final. A claim is necessarily infringed hereunder only when such infringement could not have been avoided by another commercially reasonable non-infringing implementation of Compliant Portion(s) of that particular Final Specification based on the state of the art at the time the Final Specification is/was deemed final.
  8. “Related Entity” shall mean, with respect to any Contributor or Implementer, any person, firm, corporation, partnership, or similar entity that, directly or indirectly controls, is controlled by or under common control with such Contributor or Implementer, but only for so long as such control exists. For purposes of the foregoing, "control" shall mean direct or indirect control of fifty percent (50%) or more of the voting power to elect directors of that corporation, or for any other entity, the power to direct management of such entity.
  9. “Scope” means INSERT HERE A REFERENCE TO THE SCOPE BEING DEVELOPED OR INCLUDE THE SCOPE LANGUAGE HERE IF APPROPRIATE The Scope shall not include (i) any enabling technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product or service or any portion thereof that complies with a Final Specification, but are not themselves expressly set forth in the Final Specification or (ii) the implementation of other published standards not developed by or for OpenID, and that are merely referred to in the body of the Final Specification. For purposes of defining its Scope, the Final Specification shall be deemed to include only its technical requirements as fully described therein and shall exclude any implementation examples.
  10. “Specification” means a document that contains technical information of a nature that includes one or more portions that is must be implemented as described therein for any Implementations thereof to contain a Compliant Portion.
  11. “Work Group” means a group whose actions are conducted, in accordance with the terms and conditions of this Policy and other applicable OpenID procedures, for the purpose of developing OpenID specifications.

Contributions/Contributors

By submission of a Contribution, each Contributor is deemed to agree to the terms and conditions of this Policy on Contributor’s behalf and on behalf of any known owners of any proprietary rights in the Contribution.

Where a Contribution includes materials from parties other than the Contributor, including but not limited to Related Entities of the Contributor, Contributor represents and warrants that Contributor has all necessary rights and permissions with regards to such third party materials to make the Contribution in accordance with the terms and conditions of this Policy, including but not limited to all licensing and confidentiality obligations.

Implementations/Implementers

Each Implementer shall only be entitled to the benefit of the copyright and patent licenses required within this policy if they also agree to extend to all Contributors and other Implementers the patent licenses required to be offered under this Policy.

Confidentiality

All Contributions shall be considered non-confidential information, regardless of any markings to the contrary included thereon or related thereto.

Copyrights

In the course of its work developing recommendations, OpenID receives Contributions in various forms and from many sources. The following are the terms and conditions relating to such Contributions.

  1. Copyright License. Some Contributions are not subject to copyright. However, to the extent a Contribution is or may be subject to copyright, the Contributor hereby agrees to grant a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide copyright license to OpenID, to other Contributors, and to Implementers, to reproduce, prepare derivative works from, distribute, perform and display the Contribution and derivative works thereof solely for the development and implementation of OpenID Specifications.
  2. No Obligation. Contributor acknowledges that OpenID has no duty to publish or other¬wise use or disseminate any Contribution.
  3. References. Contributor hereby grants permission to reference the name(s) and address(es) of the Contributor, but only in association with the Contribution of Contributor and not with respect to any work derived from such Contribution, without the prior written consent of Contributor.
  4. Attributions. Contributor represents that Contributions comprised of written submissions submitted by such a Contributor to OpenID comply with any copyright attribution requirements relating to third party content.
  5. Retention of Rights. Notwithstanding any licensing obligations herein, Contributor retains all rights in and to its Contribution, and there are no limitations whatsoever on Contributor’s ability to exercise any copyright rights in its Contribution or any portion thereof.

Patents

1. Limited Patent Promise. Each Contributor and Implementer hereby irrevocably makes the following promise without the requirement of any compensation or any additional terms and conditions:

Contributor/Implementer (“I” or “me”) hereby promise not to assert any Necessary Claims against any other entity (“you”) for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation or offering any service to the extent it contains or uses a Compliant Portion, subject to the following. This is a personal promise directly from me to you, and you acknowledge as a condition of benefiting from it that no rights from me are received from your suppliers, distributors, or otherwise in connection with this promise. If you file, maintain or voluntarily participate in a patent infringement lawsuit against me or my Implementation, then this personal promise does not apply with respect to any Implementation made or used by you.

This promise is not an assurance either (i) that any of my issued patent claims covers an Implementation or are enforceable or (ii) that an Implementation would not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party. No other rights except those expressly stated in this promise shall be deemed granted, waived or received by implication, exhaustion, estoppel, or otherwise.

2. Patent Disclosures. So long as Contributor’s comply with the patent licensing obligations contained in section VI 1 above, there is no requirement or expectation by others that Contributors should disclose patents or patent applications containing they have reason to believe may contain Necessary Claims.

OpenID disclaims any responsibility for identifying the existence of or for evaluating the applicability of any claimed copyrights, patents, patent applications, or other rights in the fulfilling of its obligations as outlined in the previous paragraph and will take no position on the validity or scope of any such rights.

Notices

The following notice must be included in all OpenID Specifications: The technology described in this specification was made available from contributions from various sources, including members of OpenID. Although OpenID has taken steps to help ensure that the technology is available for distribution, it takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this specification or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it has made any independent effort to identify any such rights. The OpenID IPR policy requires contributors to offer a patent promise not to assert patents against other contributors and against implementers. The OpenID IPR policy requires that implementers of this specification (in either a product or in a service) also offer such a patent promise to contributors and other implementers to be eligible to have the patent promise contained within the OpenID IPR policy apply to such implementer(s). OpenID invites any interested party to bring to its attention any copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary rights which may cover technology that may be required to practice this specification.


Open Issues/Action Items

Please add any open issues or action items here (each in a separate section).

Scope Definitions

Per the definition of “Scope” in the Definitions section, this IPR policy is dependent on published definitions of the scope of each OpenID specification. See Spec Scope Definitions for the proposed scope definitions.

No Disclosure Requirement

This draft does not impose any disclosure requirements on Contributors, i.e., Contributors are not required to disclose Necessary Claims unless they wish to withhold them, and they can do so up until a spec is finalized. This gives Contributors the ability to "submarine" an OpenID specification at the last minute. On the other hand, it makes it easier for large patent holders to participate in OpenID, because they don't have to search their patent portfolio or should we have an additional disclosure requirement.

Is this the tradeoff we want, or should there be an upfront disclosure requirement upon Contributors?

Blanket Reciprocity

The following language from the Limited Patent Promise section is based on Microsoft's Open Specification Promise:

If you file, maintain or voluntarily participate in a patent infringement lawsuit against me or my Implementation, then this personal promise does not apply with respect to any Implementation made or used by you.

This language sets up "blanket reciprocity", meaning that if you sue a Contributor for patent infringment of any kind, including infringement of patents of yours that have nothing to do with OpenID (for example a hardware patent), the Contributor is no longer bound by their patent promise on OpenID and can sue you for infringement of any Necessary Claims they have on OpenID.

Blanket reciprocity strongly favors large patent holders over small patent holders. For example, if a large patent holder is infringing on the small holder's rights (for example on a hardware patent), and the small patent holder sues on those grounds, if the large patent holder has Necessary Claims on an OpenID specification, the large patent holder can countersue for infringement of its OpenID claims even though the large patent holder's infringement has nothing to do with OpenID.

This can be addressed by removing the words "me or", as this narrows the scope of the patent promise to patent claims relevant to OpenID specifications.

Definition of "OpenID"

The policy refers to OpenID but does not provide a definition in the definitions section. This should be addressed as currently the term is quite nebulous.

Definition of "Specification" and "Final Specification"

It is not clear from the definition what the relationship is to the OpenID specifications, how the community determines a "final specification", and how this will relate to the OpenID Foundation.

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