pooling patents, version 2

Pooling patents for progress and protection
version 2

Rik van Riel <riel(at)surriel(dot)com>
december 26-30, 2002
january 1, 2000

The goal of patents is to promote technical progress and inventions;
however the patent system is often abused by big patent holders to block
entry to the marketplace by new and small companies, thus hampering
technical progress instead of promoting it.

My goals are to give small innovative companies a fair chance again and
promoting technical progress and innovation once more, all while following
the rules of the patent game to the letter.

The second version of the patent pool idea has been updated after
feedback on the SPI and AFUL.org patents mailing list and from
Alan Cox and Richard Stallman. This version tries to both give
some protection to independant free software developers without
patents and to give an even stronger incentive to "the rest of the
world" to not start any IP lawsuits against any participant in the
patent pool. Incidentally this makes this patent pool idea nothing
more than a natural extension of what many companies (eg. Red Hat)
are already doing with their patents.

The basic ideas behind the patent pool idea are:

1) Any person or organisation can participate by contributing
his/her/its patents to the pool.

2) Contributing a patent to the pool means giving the whole world
the right to use the technology described in the patent, on a
royalty free basis. [*]

3) If somebody starts an IP related lawsuit against any of the
members of the patent pool, the plaintiff forfeits the right
granted in (2) and will no longer be allowed to use the technology
described in any of the patents from the patent pool. This means
that the whole "arsenal" of the patent pool is available to the
participants, for defensive use in patent lawsuits.

4) A participant can withdraw from the patent pool, losing the rights to
use the patent pool for protection in the future. However, once a
patent has been contributed to the pool, that patent cannot be
withdrawn from the pool and will stay in the pool until the patent
expires; this to protect the other participants in the pool.

5) If a participant's last patent in the pool expires, the participant
needs to do an invention and contribute a new patent to the pool.
This clause is present because the patent pool should promote
technical progress and inventions, like patents are supposed to.

[*] This may sound strange, but it is a tactic already in use by
quite a number of companies. Red Hat uses something like this on
its patents and IBM has an "if you sue us, you lose all rights to
this software" clause in some of its free software. Extending this
already accepted trick to a large pool of patents (and maybe even
software?) should provide a nice incentive against starting IP
lawsuits.

This patent pool is primarily meant for small and medium size companies,
who have few patents each and are a frequent target for bullying and
predatory practices by large patent holders, who use patents as a way
to prevent small companies from entering the market, thereby stifling
technical progress itself.

This patent pool should:
1) protect inventors and companies making products
2) promote technical progress
3) be a win-win play for all participants

If you have an idea on how to improve this patent pool idea to better
suit these goals, or if you have an additional goal you think should be
included, please let me know.

Feel free to share this document with other people.

Rik van Riel <riel(at)surriel(dot)com>