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The "Defensive Patent License" an Open Defensive Patent Pool
capedgirardeau writes "Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:: 'Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin has an in-depth look at the "Defensive Patent License," a kind of judo for the patent system created by ... EFF's Jason Schultz (who started EFF's Patent Busting Project) and ... Jen Urban (who co-created the ChillingEffects clearinghouse). As you'd expect from two such killer legal freedom fighters, the DPL is audacious, exciting, and wicked cool. It's a license pool that companies opt into, and members of the pool pledge not to sue one another for infringement. If you're ever being sued for patent infringement, you can get an automatic license to a conflicting patent just by throwing your patents into the pool. The more patent trolls threaten people, the more incentive there is to join the league of Internet patent freedom fighters."
can anyone join this, or is it only for patent holders who "throw their patents into the pool"?
It would be wicked cool if anyone, including independent software developers, could join and gain the protection offered from the trolls too.
Given the developments in the HTC vs. Apple case (http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/htc-denied-use-of-google-patents-in-apple-case-1084691), will the Defensive Patent License actually work, since the defendant won't actually *own* the patent?
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
This would provide, potentially, fine defense against being sued by an actual company with actual products, because with a large patent pool you'd be likely to find one that your attacker is potentially infringing.
But patent trolls do not infringe, because they do not have products.
This isn't useful if you're sued by a patent troll. You can't counter-sue a company that makes no products for infringement, because they're not actually producing anything that would infringe on a "conflicting patent".
I seem to remember quite a few stories about Google, MS, Adobe and others building patent pools. Is the major difference of this patent pool that it's run by the EFF instead of a board of corporations?
It sounds great but ultimately useless. A pledge not to sue is nice and all, but what happens if/when one company breaks that pledge? Does their contract terminate rights to the other patents in the pool? Good luck getting that past the corporate lawyers. Is there some financial benefit to playing nice? Is it more than the profit to be made by backstabbing your competitors?
While the thought of "in this sandbox we're playing nicely together" is joyously innocent, I can't see it working too well in practice. Good luck, guys.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
If we extend the Mutually Assured Destruction metaphor, would this be the equivalent of the Warsaw Pact or NATO? And if so how long before this actually leads to an escalation of patent pooling by a group of patent trolls? Its a neat idea, but sometimes I do worry about the unintended consequences of attempting to game an already severely broken system.
that you have a _license_ to a patent from the patent pool doesn't enable you to start suing people for infringing on those patents.
the pool itself with it's donated(the pool would have to have ownership of them) patents would have to sue whoever is suing the guy needing protection.
so the pool would need to transfer patents back and forth quite a lot.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
How does this actually benefit anyone? Companies with deep patent portfolios stand to lose both their competitive advantage and lost opportunity for licensing fees by making those patents freely available to everyone in the group (at least, it sounds like they're freely available if they're pledging not to sue one another), so you won't be seeing Microsofts, Googles, or Apples joining anytime soon. The only sorts of companies joining this are the ones who are afraid of being sued, and they're not about to be suing anyone else anyway.
So, basically, the companies with oodles of patents (i.e. patent trolls and large corporations) won't be joining the group anytime soon, which means that they'll continue to be able to sue everyone in the group, and most of those aren't scared of conflicting patents since they can afford to simply bankrupt the smaller companies via legal fees. Meanwhile, the companies in the group have essentially commoditized themselves by allowing everyone else in the group to use their patents freely.
IANAL, but how is this a good thing? What's the obvious thing that I'm missing?
But if I have a great idea, I want to profit from it!! I don't want someone who DID NOT have that idea to profit from it instead. Plain and simple - in today's knowledge based economy, patent is the only currency an innovator has - lose it and you'd end up poor. So this is not a patent pool for good - it is like a thieves market!
Like most such schemes (and this is not the first), this won't help against patent trolls, as they don't use patents, and are thus immune to the threat of countersuits. A patent troll is sort of the equivalent of what the SCO Group has become: a company which makes nothing, and whose entire purpose is litigation.
my dick can be patented ? File a case against a woman who's using your "patent" illegally for any reasons lol. The stories and case on this one could be so funny. Every century got a type of theme attached to them. 20th century shall be patent century. It's getting ridiculous the more I hear it.
I was investigating how to start something like this, glad to see I already have some options or at least examples.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
I prefer to leave shit on the internet.
What if we did a reverse-troll, so either companies join DPL or DPL files troll lawsuits until they join. It's like MPEG LA but not just for video.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
The result won't be much different than what all the Silicon Valley companies already did regarding hiring practices: 'I won't poach your employees, you won't poach mine; we'll just poach (and underpay) the employees that aren't in the good-ole-boy club'. Just search and replace patents for worker bees.
I'm still shocked the Feds went after the Si V folks for collusion, but the end result will only be a wrist-slapping cost of doing business fine. It's a cute ivory tower idea, but the result would only be the rich staying filthy.
The problem with patents is that they cost a lot of money to obtain. It would make sense, that for defensive purposes, we establish an auxiliary office (or organization) where ideas can be publishes and searched as "prior art" without having to have the $10ks of dollars it takes to get a patent. Such a warehouse would accept contributions of ideas from everyone, at minimal (or no cost).
I've been following and considering the idea of patents as "defensive" for some years and my verdict is it is a rubbish. Publication and being first is all it takes, and anyone shelling out money to obtain a patent intends to make money off of it. It was a challenge for me to finally identify it as spin, but seeing the industry melt down lately, there is no such thing in practice as a "defensive patent".
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
A lot of posts and the summary seem to be reading this as an attempt to provide absolute protection to a company, at which it would fail in the case of a clear cut patent, since a patent troll would never join.
However, and please correct me if I'm wrong, I thought the purpose of such organizations was to muddy the waters such that you become too large of a cost for a patent troll.
The logic goes something like this. If I'm a lone company with few patents in the field of my product, I have little to stand on in court, and correspondingly the cost of lawyers to the troll is fairly small. By joining a consortium that has a bunch of similar patents to the one I'm claimed to be infringing, it requires a hell of a lot more lawyer time to figure it out, and increases the risk of losing for the troll to the point where the risk vs. return ratio isn't nearly as compelling.
For instance, the purchase of patent portfolios by Google was usually explained to me as a way to make the legal situation so complicated that suing was just unappealing.
After reading this, it seems to me like this might be a replay of the DOJ's problem either last year or 2 years ago, with the big tech companies agreed not to poach programmers from each other. Legally, I don't see a difference between voluntarily giving up the legal right to sue an infringer in return for a complementary agreement, from voluntarily giving up the legal right to hire an employee in return for a complementary agreement.
This seems like an antitrust violation in the making.
What we need is a way for individuals and companies to opt out of the intellectual monopolies system altogether. Something like "I promise never to asset an intellectual monopoly against anyone (except defensively); in return, I obtain the right to never be sued". It really needs a whole country to be brave enough to unilaterally scrap the patent system: and whichever one does this first will make a fortune from investment. Think "tax-haven" but where's it's really a "freedom to innovate haven".
I foresee... Foohbahz, a wholly owned subsidiary of microsoft-redmond, a wholly owned subsidiary of microsoft pacific-northwest, a wholly owned subsidiary of microsoft-usa, a wholly owned subsidiary of microsoft inc
(Or whatever it all is in practice)
Joins and contributes their singularly owned patent on electronic-ass-scratcher controlled over the internet.
Who happens to get worldwide licenses to all megacorp products (sold at a loss of course), and themself relicenses them with a 5-9's profit-sharing agreement.
Just saying -- I hope these people are fully and wholly prepared for the lawyers that will try to hack this.
But I wish them all luck.
Such a thing already exists for Linux development companies.
http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/about.php
patents are valuable because you can sue over them; that's why companies spend money on them. besides, which lawyers would advise taking action that reduces lawsuits?
Heh - if you'll permit the puns.
You are not Our Attorney yet we really appreciate you being "our attorney". This is great "legal advice" without being Legal Advice.
So you basically busted the entire concept behind the story, which then opens up the real can of worms, which is, "why did it take you to bust it when the EFF has a few lawyers of their own on speed dial?"
The best I can think of is this is the "first feeble step in the defense of patent madness". Clearly we're coming to the agreement that there are big flaws in this proposal to solve.
I look at all news from a Gaming Combo perspective. So what is the *other* piece of this combo that really can quiet the patent madness down?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Ars?
What The Fuck.
How many slashvertisments for other sites can you put in the first line of a slashdot submission?
Could you seriously not just link us to the one with the actual story in the first fucking place?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So, if this had been something that, say, Microsoft, started and a few other large patent owners were allowed into, wouldn't everyone be screaming anti-trust, rather than "audacious, exciting, and wicked cool"? Obviously the open opt-in makes this seem warmer and fuzzier, but since that will only deter larger patent-holders from joining and since most patent-trolls wouldn't give away their rights to sue to anyone, how is this less evil?
all's in the title... ;-)
There are many reasons why the NPE (“patent troll”) business model has fast become dominant in the world of IP. Thomas Edison held over 1,000 patents, but practiced none of them. He invented, which is what he did best, and let others manufacture products from his inventions. If an inventor cannot sue for patent infringement and recover damages, they why should anyone invent anything? Only vigorous patent enforcement rewards inventors for their inventions and incentivizes others to invent.