Patentleft (also patent left, copyleft-style patent license or open patent) is the practice of licensing patents (especially biological patents) for royalty-free use, on the condition that adopters license related improvements they develop under the same terms. Copyleft-style licensors seek "continuous growth of a universally accessible technology commons" from which they, and others, will benefit.
Patentleft is analogous to copyleft, a license which allows distribution of a copyrighted work and derived works, but only under the same terms.
Video Patentleft
Uses
The Biological Innovation for Open Society (BiOS) project implemented a patentleft system to encourage re-contribution and collaborative innovation of their technology. BiOS holds a patented technology for transferring genes in plants, and licenses the technology under the terms that, if a license holder improves the gene transfer tool and patents the improvement, then their improvement must be made available to all the other license holders.
The open patent idea is designed to be practiced by consortia of research-oriented companies and increasingly by standards bodies. These also commonly use open trademark methods to ensure some compliance with a suite of compatibility tests, e.g. Java, X/Open both of which forbid use of the mark by the non-compliant.
On October 12, 2001 the Free Software Foundation and Finite State Machine Labs Inc. (FSMLabs) announced a GPL - compliant open-patent license for FSMLabs' software patent, US 5995745 . Titled the Open RTLinux patent license Version 2, it provides for usage of this patent in accordance with the GPL.
Maps Patentleft
Example
Person A has a patent, and licenses it under a patentleft license.
Person B has two patents in her product and wants to use Person A's patents in that product. Person B also wants to charge royalties for her two patents. She decides to use Person A's patent, but now must license her patents, royalty-free, under the same terms as Person A's patent.
Person C has three patents in his product and wants to use Person B's two patents in that product, but doesn't want to use Person A's patent. Person C also wants to charge royalties for his three patents. He decides to use Person B's patent, but now must license his patents, royalty-free, under the same terms as Person A's patent.
See also
- Copyleft
- Patent troll
- Public domain
- Software patent
- Viral license
- Open content
- Open Invention Network
- Open Patent Alliance
References
Further reading
- Ménage, Guillaume; Dietrich, Yann (March 2010). ""Patent Left"" (PDF). Les Nouvelles. Licensing Executives Society International: 42-46. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-16. Retrieved 2010-11-30.
- Richard Stallman (1999-06-22). "On "Free Hardware"". -- Richard Stallman criticizes patentleft because of cost of applying for patents
External links
- http://www.openpatents.org/
- Open Hardware Licenses
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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