A couple of months ago, Twitter made a pledge that is heartening to anyone sick of patent lawsuits. The company will not use any patents derived from employee inventions to launch offensive lawsuits without the inventor’s permission.
The pledge might help Twitter attract ethical engineers, but ultimately it’s just one company taking a stand among a sea of litigators that are happy to prevent the sale of competitors’ products or extract licensing fees. A potentially more ambitious project called the “Defensive Patent License” aims to take the same basic idea practiced by Twitter and spread it across a big part of the technology industry.
Developed by Berkeley Law professors Jason Schultz and Jennifer Urban, the Defensive Patent License (DPL) project has been in development well before Twitter’s pledge. The project just launched its website and the legal document members will be asked to commit to.
Bunnie is/was also working on a PatentX system that’s similar for open source hardware (or anyone really).
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
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