[cc-community] Help w/ Defensive Patents Agreement

Mike Belshe mike at belshe.com
Wed Feb 6 13:18:00 EST 2008


Thanks for these links.

The Microsoft agreement is complicated and has some clear ambiguity.

The IBM agreement appears to be exactly what I'm proposing here; although it
is specific to IBM.  I'm hoping to create a generic form of the same thing.
Does anyone know if this holds water?  I like the fact that the agreement is
so simple.  It doesn't cover the topic of the company being sold (IBM
doesn't really worry about that).  And I think it's important to cover the
case of startups that fail and preventing the defensive patents from falling
to a legal patent machine....

Thanks!
Mike


On 2/6/08, Fred Benenson <fred.benenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There's also the Microsoft version of this :
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/community.mspx
>
> It's basically a pledge-not-to-sue, though the FSF was quick to point out
> the promise is of little value:
>
> http://www.softwarefreedom.org/perspectives/2006/ms-patent-promise/
>
> "The patent covenant only applies to software that you develop at home and
> keep for yourself; the promises don't extend to others when you distribute.
> You cannot pass the rights to your downstream recipients, even to the
> maintainers of larger projects on which your contribution is built. Further,
> to qualify for the pledge, a developer must remain unpaid for her work. "
>
> There's also the more substantial IBM Patent Covenant:
>
> http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/isplist.shtml
>
> There's a good analysis here:
>
>
> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070713-ibm-promotes-open-standards-with-far-reaching-patent-pledge.html
>
>
> F
>
>
> On Feb 6, 2008 10:12 AM, Terry Hancock <hancock at anansispaceworks.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 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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> >
>
>
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