Patentleft
{{Use American English|date = March 2019}}
{{Short description|Royalty-free patent licensing}}
{{Use mdy dates|date = March 2019}}
{{Licensing of patents}}
Patentleft 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.{{cite book
| last = Hope
| first = Janet
| title = The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes
| volume = 1358
| publisher = Harvard University Press
| series = Lecture Notes in Mathematics
| pages = 176–187
| year = 2008
| doi = 10.1007/b62130
| isbn = 978-0-674-02635-3
| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=IPTwYNqpJWgC
}}[http://www.openpatents.org/ Open Patent license proposal at openpatents.org]
Patentleft is analogous to copyleft, a license that allows distribution of a copyrighted work and derived works, but only under the same or equivalent terms.
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 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.John T. Wilbanks and Thomas J. Wilbanks, "Science, Open Communication and Sustainable Development", 13 April 2010, "[http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/4/993/]"
The open patent idea is designed to be practiced by consortia of research-oriented companies[http://www.bios.net/daisy/bios/10/version/live/part/4/data Cambia Biosciences Initiative] 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 the use of the mark by the non-compliant.{{citation needed|date=November 2011}}
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, {{Cite patent|country=US|number=5995745}}. Titled the Open RTLinux patent license Version 2, it provides for usage of this patent in accordance with the GPL.[https://www.gnu.org/press/2001-09-18-RTLinux.html FSF/FSMLabs press release for the RTLinux Open Patent License], October 12, 2001.
See also
References
{{Reflist}}
Further reading
- {{cite journal
| last1 = Ménage
| first1 = Guillaume
| last2 = Dietrich
| first2 = Yann
|date=March 2010
| title = "Patent Left"
| journal = Les Nouvelles
| pages = 42–46
| publisher = Licensing Executives Society International
| access-date = 2010-11-30
| url = http://www.lesi.org/images/60d5b196-0941-407d-a3d0-8c79d678c6bf.pdf
| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110716225054/http://www.lesi.org/images/60d5b196-0941-407d-a3d0-8c79d678c6bf.pdf
| archive-date = 2011-07-16
| url-status = dead
}}
- {{Cite news
|url = http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-06-22-005-05-NW-LF-0049
|author = Richard Stallman
|title = On "Free Hardware"
|date = 1999-06-22
|author-link = Richard Stallman
}} — Richard Stallman criticizes patentleft because of cost of applying for patents
External links
- https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Patentleft
- [https://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licenses Open Hardware Licenses]
- [https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/155464 Standardized Terms and Conditions For Open Patenting]
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