If it were me, and the true intent was to distribute the Tesla patents as widely as possible, I would have said "Tesla pledges to license its entire patent portfolio, on a worldwide non-exclusive no-royalty basis, to any interested party. We will ask for consideration in the amount of $1 for a 99 year license. Your lawyers and accountants can reassure you that these sort of symbolic commitments hold up in court. They'll also no doubt ask to see the full terms, which are about as boring as you'd expect, and which are available from our Legal Department."
I believe the message was phrased in a way to be directed at consumers so that hopefully the consumers will send a message one way or another to the other manufacturers causing them to come to more official agreements with Tesla. (which will of course have terms).
(i'm not asserting it is perfect, just that it is an effort towards what you describe)
What could be an interesting solution is to prevent people who want the protection of the mutual license from licensing patents from anyone else under any other terms. So if you want the protection of the license and a patent troll approaches you, your only choice is to either vanquish the troll or buy the patent outright and immunize everyone.
That should mean no more Rockstars at least, and should make life more difficult for trolls because they couldn't license patents anymore, only sell them outright.
It is my understanding that Rockstar existed prior to Microsoft and others getting involved. They merely footed the bill.
It doesn't do anything about non-practicing entities because it can't. There's no formulation of words that could cause a license to have any bearing on NPEs.
Your potential wording would make the patent license completely unusable. Perhaps an alternative might be something along the lines of: You may not license a patent that has been involved in legal dispute. If a licensed patent is subsequently involved in legal dispute, either this license or that license must be terminated within NN months.
citrik 10 minutes ago | link [dead]
I don't think the "in business to make profits" part is entirely true. Apple and Tesla are both leading examples of companies that are out for something other than profits first. You can say that shareholder interests and publicly traded companies require ... but at the end of the day those are two companies that don't let capitalist dogma drive their path. I wish there were more than a handful.
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I think AnthonyMouse's comment was referring to NPEs that were sponsored by a practicing entity that is subject to a reciprocal license. An effective such license would have to restrict participants from indirectly funding attacks that would be violations of their agreement if they carried out the attacks themselves.
Apple and Tesla just want to make great stuff. Not just great, esoteric stuff, but products that are also accessible to the mainstream. The profits are just a way of keeping score and giving them options for the future.
They're kind of like the Beatles, who as an organization always knew how to do things big commercially. But commerce is never what drove The Beatles. They understood that winning in the marketplace gave them more leeway to dream bigger and bigger.
It's easy to say, "why would a company want to exist besides to make profit?" But I think a company can be a creative outlet for its employees and shareholders, just like any other medium. The profits just ensure they have more creative control in the future.
That isn't true at all. You can do something about NPEs by changing the behavior of their targets. You take away the ability to license a patent without securing a license for everyone and now the troll can no longer rely on extracting nuisance value settlements from large numbers of targets, because for the target the cost of losing the reciprocal license (and having to fight all of those patent holders) now exceeds the cost of invalidating the troll's patent. And if everyone sees the same calculus and everyone fights, trolling as a business model could become unprofitable.
> Your potential wording would make the patent license completely unusable.
Why is that? The ideal endgame would be to bring about a de facto nullification of software patents. The more patents that become licensed under the defensive license, the more incentive there is to put all of your own patents under it, which creates all the more incentive for others to do the same. Obviously you wouldn't have e.g. IBM signing on the first day, but as it snowballs the incentive to do so increases over time. At the end of the chain you would have a situation where there would be ten times as many patents that IBM is infringing than they own and the only way they could get a license to those patents is to join the agreement with everyone else.
I would think another interesting feature would be to allow anyone who has signed on to the agreement to use any of the signatories' patents offensively against anyone who hasn't, in exchange for a large chunk of the proceeds, essentially on a contingent fee basis. I believe a third of the amount recovered is typical? That would allow patent trolling to eat itself, because patents lawyers could sign on to the agreement at no cost (since they don't characteristically own patents) and then have instant access to a huge corpus of patents to go sue everyone else with, until such time as everyone relevant has signed on. And it would also create an incentive to sign on in the early days, because if you sign on and have any good patents there is a reasonable chance that some lawyers will go out and sue Microsoft et al at their own expense and then give you half the money. Until there are a lot of signatories that should be about as profitable for existing patent holders as hiring a lawyer to go sue people on your behalf without the defensive conditions, unless everybody starts signing on right away, which would be even better.
There are a million reasons why I really want to like Apple. But I can't, because they use mostly trivial patents offensively against their competitors. That's not controlling one's own destiny, that's forcibly imposing one's will on others.
But the overall business goal is to make money, because unless they're making money they employees will not be able to continue making great things or doing great things.
That what I thought "in good faith" meant.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/12/5804890/bmw-confirms-that-...
Comments like that don't do anything other than push Apple fanboys to champion them even more, followed by Apple haters to criticise them even more.
I'm saying that management of Tesla isn't acting like a naive college kid giving away the store. There is a strategy. And the other auto companies will see it for what it is.
Now, in a fair competition, that should give them an advantage over others who failed to manage their risks. But the way everyone here behaves, people expect them to just let things lie, effectively footing the bill for the rest of the industry. How's that fair?
Well, they (at least many of them -- e.g. Microsoft, Apple, etc) also 'play the game' with their own patents, so it's not out of character for them to use patents offensively. By using their patents offensively, they are contributing to the situation where they are required to 'foot the bill' with their own liabilities, at least. If they adopted a less aggressive stance, and instead put the money they've spent on lawyers towards lobbying for patent reform, what they 'need' to do to limit their liability might be really different.