[cc-community] Help w/ Defensive Patents Agreement
drew Roberts
zotz at 100jamz.com
Wed Feb 6 09:07:29 EST 2008
On Wednesday 06 February 2008 08:24:41 Giorgos Cheliotis wrote:
> Just my 2 cents, as someone who has worked for a large IT company that is
> known for its patent hunger and someone that has 3 patents with that
> company: you can't negotiate the terms of your patents with the employer,
> at least not with employers I can think of. What one could do, is NOT
> patent inventions which they want to keep free, though this is potentially
> a treacherous path which one must tread carefully. I have a hard time
> imagining a corporate employer who would allow their engineers to impose
> constraints on the use of the patents.
>
> If you could convince some companies to adopt "defensive" contracts as the
> de facto standard and develop official policies restricting the possible
> uses of their patents, this might be attractive to some companies, as
> exhibiting a form of socially responsible IP policy (along the lines of "we
> are not evil").
Right, it could be as you say, and the pool idea might make this even more
attractive to them.
> But it would probably require pressure at the institutional
> level for this to happen. I'm afraid that individual inventors would be
> helpless when confronting their employer with such terms.
>
> Though perhaps I am missing something and there are contexts in which this
> would work... I just don't know them.
>
all the best,
drew
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