Well, in this case you would have open statements by one of the parties that
the agreement covers a product that can be shown to contain my code. Note that I
can't demand access to their agreement. What I can demand is either that access,
for the purpose of determining whether or not their agreement causes one party
to breach their obligations to me regarding my code, or alternatively to have
both parties state in a legally binding fashion that the patents in question are
not practiced by my code. The catch there is that if the infringing code were
really mine, then if either of those parties later tries to sue anyone else I
can jump up waving that statement and go "Hold on here, they already said my
code doesn't practice their patents, so how can it infringe upon them?". You can
imagine what'd happen if a large number of the copyright holders of the GPL'd
code in Android made such a demand.
It wouldn't even be necessary to ask
that the agreement be allowed to be made public. If none of the copyright
holders turned around and took legal action, we'd know the patents didn't touch
on the GPL'd code. And if the patents did, at least some of the copyright
holders would be taking action over the GPL violation. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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