오픈소스환경에서의 특허의 보호와 이용관계에 관한 연구 - 오픈소스라이선스의 특허조항에 대한 비교분석을 중심으로 -

This study discusses how patent license is granted in the OSS environment and what the critical issues are, based on the analysis of more than 70 OSS licenses certified by OSI. For more systematic analysis, it compares with and analyzes pertinent patent clauses in the OSS licenses as well as general patent license deals. It further examines differences among OSS licenses in the critical issues. In addition, it investigates relevant cases in order to examine how the critical issues are brought into focus and resolved in real disputes. The OSS patent licenses usually stress the free use of pertinent patents in the OSS community rather than the protection of them, compared with general patent license contract. However, there exists a degree of difference among OSS licenses. For example, MPL, CDDL, CPL, and EPL maintain the values of pertinent patent licenses by restricting the use of them unlike GPL. EPL aims to protect patent rights by reducing a patent retaliation clause. The reason why there exist differences among OSS licenses is because enterprises involved in OSS such as IBM possess a great deal of patents. However, GPL, used by more than 70% OSS projects, emphasizes the free use of patents and restricts relevant patents accordingly. Therefore, enterprises equipped with considerable patent portfolio need to pay close attention to the use of OSS. Recently, a plenty of electronic goods such as digital TV and cellular phones have employed OSS and accordingly many patent disputes have been raised to the enterprises using OSS. In this aspect, it is significant to analyze how the OSS license deals with patent rights and figure out positive measures.