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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."
Some of these patents, just individual ones, could easily make me a billionaire. I am not kidding.
I've been in the business a long time, hunting the whole time for inventions such as these. Consider that the hugely popular game Angry Birds was anything but an overnight success, in that that particular game was the developers fifty-second attempt at publishing a successful product.
While I did toy with the idea of crushing Bill Gates and Steve Jobs like bugs, getting rich has never been the reason I've been a coder. I do it to contribute something of lasting benefit to society.
So here is my plan for my software patents: folks like Apple don't get licenses to them until they stop suing other companies for infringing on patens that should never have been granted. Patents like the one one the slider one uses to unlock the lock screen on iOS devices.
The patent law specifically says that patentable inventions must be "Novel and Unobvious". When I worked for Apple in the mid-90s, I visited the corporate library from time to time, which had on file every single patent that the company owned. At the time there were maybe thirty or forty of them, each one being for something really cool, useful, novel and unobvious.
Somewhere somehow the US Patent Office lots its way, and started granting patents for obvious things that are not in the least bit novel. It seems to me that one ought to be able to bust a patent for which no prior art exist, simply by demonstrating to a jury that experts in the field - such as us coders - would consider the claimed inventions to be either obvious, or not novel.
Every single one of my upcoming patents are for things that are quite novel, and not at all obvious. The economic benefit to humanity from my publishing these patents will be in the trillions of dollars. Countless human lives will be saved, and endless suffering relieved.
My only purpose in patenting these inventions, rather than just openly publishing them without any claims at all, is to stop the patent wars, by preventing companies such as Apple and Microsoft from using my inventions until they themselves stop abusing the patent system.
I once agreed with Richard Stallman about software patents, but I no longer do. Without patents we would have trade secrets. Consider that even today we do not know how Damascus Steel was manufactured.