Hi,

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Geir Magnusson Jr. <ge...@pobox.com> wrote:

I could find a few Adobe patents regarding CJK fonts, see [1]. They don't seem to be directly related to the way PDFBox is using the files, but I'm not too much of a PDFBox expert (I'm just a mentor there) to say for sure.

More generally, there are probably a whole load of patents that cover things implemented in a project like PDFBox. Adobe has a number of such patents, but is explicitly licensing them for use in software like PDFBox, see [2] (text included at the end of this message). I have no way of knowing whether this patent grant covers all the patents "needed" by PDFBox.

Do we have some guidelines or examples on how such patent issues should be documented in an Apache project?

[1] http://www.google.com/patents?q=adobe+cjk [2] http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/support/topic_legal_notices.html

BR,

Jukka Zitting

----

Adobe Patent Clarification Notice:

Reading and writing PDF files

Adobe has a number of patents covering technology that is disclosed in the Portable Document Format (PDF) Specification, version 1.3 and later, as documented in PDF Reference and associated Technical Notes (the "Specification"). Adobe desires to promote the use of PDF for information interchange among diverse products and applications. Accordingly, the following patents are licensed on a royalty-free, nonexclusive basis for the term of each patent and for the sole purpose of developing software that produces, consumes, and interprets PDF files that are compliant with the Specification:

U.S. Patent Numbers:

5,634,064 5,737,599 5,781,785 5,819,301 6,028,583 6,289,364 6,421,460

In addition, the following patent is licensed on a royalty-free, nonexclusive basis for its term and for the sole purpose of developing software that produces PDF files that are compliant with the Specification (specifically excluding, however, software that consumes and/or interprets PDF files):

U.S. Patent Number:

5,860,074