List for discussion of patent tools

[Bryan Bishop <kanzure AT gmail.com>]

Hey all,

I have found my way here from this page:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Patent_Tools_Public_Discussion

I was wondering about the non-profit-research-only non-assertion
pledge tool mentioned on the page. I became aware of the patent tools
discussion in light of the open source hardware community. Ayah Bdeir
dropped a nice link for us to follow and lead us here. In particular,
one idea that I have been kicking around (fed to me in part by Joe
Rayhawk) for the hardware community is a non-assertion pledge for
patent owners who wish to promote open source hardware. In this
scenario, OSI, FSF, EFF, TAPR, CC, and DFSG principles would be
written into a set of principles that would guide whether or not
something is considered to be "open source" (in the hardware community
sense).

I am not sure how specific this would have to be or how impractical it
presently sounds. The GNU General Public License v3 is very specific
about redistribution, modification, etc., and the rights granted to
the end-user. Would something equally verbose be needed at the center
of this patent pledge scenario?

>From the mile-high view, it seems that the non-profit-research-only
specification is more stringent than the open source hardware
community would prefer as a legal vehicle. Already we see businesses
like Makerbot Industries licensing their content under CC-BY 3.0 and
in some cases GPL, BSD, etc., deeper in the internal RepRap community.
In this instance, there are no patents involved. But it would be easy
to imagine a scenario where patents were involved from the onset. The
proliferation of open source hardware in the commercial markets is
really interesting, and IMHO worth investigating whether or not it
would be possible. Yes, I understand that this is *not* the intent of
the research non-assertion pledge currently on the CC wiki.

In light of these ideas, and the recent "Opening Hardware" workshop in
NYC, I was wondering if anyone has comments, thoughts and advice to
share? Thank you! I also have many links to dump if anyone is
interested in the topology of these communities at the moment, and
what various projects are using for licenses, etc.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507