Every great leap forward was met with skepticism by those
whose vision was too limited to see beyond the horizon. Innovation,
by its nature, requires the disruption of today in order to define
the future. If we are to have a future, it must be defined by
sustainability, the pursuit of which is already disrupting today's
status quo.
By Science Commons - Making the Web Work for Science
GLOBE-Net (February 3, 2010) - Creative Commons
has a vision of creating an open innovation platform that promotes
the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential
to solve important global or industry-wide challenges.
Open innovation is characterized by leveraging knowledge shared
across many participants in a market, including companies,
individuals, suppliers, distributors, academia, and many others to
solve common problems and to assist internal innovation.
Our goal is to encourage patent holders to make
their patent portfolio available for licensing through public
license offers that are offered to everyone on reasonable terms,
while retaining the defensive benefits of patents.
Many patent holders have patented inventions that could have
broad or new applications in areas that they did not anticipate,
but they may not have a strategy to actively license them or offer
them for such uses. By making public license offers on reasonable
terms, patent holders can encourage others to seek out novel uses,
which can have important economic or environmental benefits.
To provide the maximum benefit, we propose the following
principles for patent licenses:
1) the terms and conditions of the license should be made public
and openly available for all to read;
2) the offer is valid and complete, so that anyone who can agree
to it is empowered to accept without further negotiation.
Furthermore, we encourage patent owners to consider making their
patents available for licensing without fee or only a nominal fee
and with few or no field of use limitations. This allows the most
broadly useful inventions to achieve high impact and find new,
innovative uses.
Another important way to use patents to promote innovation is to
free up researchers and scientists to perform basic research
without fear of patent litigation. To this end, we are proposing a
patent non-assertion statement that creates a voluntary research
exemption, permitting non-profit research use by anyone. This can
help to mitigate some of the effects of the narrowing of the
"experimental use" exception by courts.
Based on these principles, we are working on a patent
non-assertion and a model patent license that can be useful to
initiatives such as GX, our initial program prototype.