Quote Originally Posted by Ex-Cyber View Post
grantek, I think your reasoning here is flawed. From what I've been able to gather, patent licenses for end users are usually implied rather than explicit. I don't know the details of how an implied license is scoped, but it seems like the safe assumption would be that it's a narrow license that only covers use of the product.
Right. Consider this:

I buy something - lets say it's a commercial washing machine.

Then i build my own, copying the patented stuff that i had bought.

I claim it's fine to do this, because by buying the machine i got a license to use that patent.

That's obviously not how the patent systems works, it's just harder to figure out how it would apply to software. But I think the same applies - you have a license to use the patents in the particular driver that comes with the product, but creating your own clone which also uses the patent would not be possible.