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Ask Slashdot: Open Patent Licenses?
felipe13 writes "We are working on a new piece of code that will be protected under a GPL license, this is fine for the code itself, but what about our 'innovations'? Are there any 'Open Patent License' models similar to the GPL or Creative Commons? We have Google patenting the highlight of search occurrences, Facebook protecting the word 'Book,' and Apple registering body movements. This is becoming ridiculous to a point. Now the patent trolls are making a killing as well. Does the open source community has a good way to protect its innovations and inventions? There are some initiatives to buy patents and release them to the public or at least place them is a protected area, but where would my very small company register a new way to include titles in a private message? Where could Drupal patent the use of 'hooks' to let developers interact with the core of the application? (If they invented this, I am not really sure.) I don't want to wake up in 10 years and discover that X huge company patented my innovation and that now I actually have to pay them for it." There's OpenPatents.org, there's the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance, there's CERN's newly-updated Open Hardware license, and there are domain-specific patent sharing organizations like the Open Patent Alliance; what else is out there?
GPL is based on copyright which is automatic.
Patents are not automatic, so you need to patent your invention, and worry about (free) licensing afterwards.
If you wanted something more BSD-like, publish without patenting.
The thing that kills patents is prior art. So if you're releasing something to the public domain, make sure to document every step of the way, everything that is potentially patentable. If you invented it first, then with proper documentation, nobody else can patent it...
...at least until the new "whoever files first" rules go into effect.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Alternately, if you wish your invention to be in the public domain, you can file for Statutory Invention Registration. This will cause the filing to be in the USPTO database and thus more likely to be found during a prior art search for future patent applications than if it was just published in a journal.