[cc-community] Help w/ Defensive Patents Agreement

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Wed Feb 6 10:12:20 EST 2008


Mike Belshe wrote:
> Like many others, I fundamentally believe software patents are broken.  Due
> to the current business climate, we can't get rid of them.  Yet, the more we
> make, the worse the problem gets.  I'd like to mitigate this.

I agree with the poster who said you'd probably have a pretty hard time
selling your employer on this, unless you sell them on it wholesale.

OTOH, there is an industry organization doing something about this, and
that might be the thing for you to pursue:

http://www.patentcommons.org/

This initiative was started a couple of years ago. I haven't really been
keeping up with it, but AFAIK, they're still very active.

The idea here is to collect a large number of patents to be held in
common and only used defensively. By participating in this project, your
company might improve its corporate image, improve its trust
relationship with its engineers (because of the issue you describe), and
of course, augment the defensive value of patents by benefit from other
patents in the commons.

Which might be enough to sell them on it.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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