Cross-licensing
A patent cross-licensing agreement is a contract between two or more parties to grant each other licenses to use their patented technologies or inventions. This allows each party to access and utilize the other party's patented technology for their own commercial purposes.
As an incentive to acquire software patents
Richard Stallman has noted that the practice of cross-licensing allows companies to create "exclusive clubs" that have access to various patented software technology:[1]
IBM wrote an article in its house magazine, Think magazine—I think it's issue 5, 1990—about the benefit IBM got from its almost 9,000 US patents at the time (now it's up to 45,000 or more). They said that one of the benefits was that they collected money, but the main benefit, which they said was perhaps an order of magnitude greater, was “getting access to the patents of others,” namely cross-licensing.
What this means is since IBM, with so many patents, can make almost everybody give them a cross-license, IBM avoids almost all the grief that the patent system would have inflicted on anybody else. So that's why IBM wants software patents. That's why the megacorporations in general want software patents, because they know that by cross-licensing, they will have a sort of exclusive club on top of a mountain peak. And all the rest of us will be down here, and there's no way we can get up there. You know, if you're a genius, you might start up a small company and get some patents, but you'll never get into IBM's league, no matter what you do.
References
- ↑ Stallman Richard, The Danger of Software Patents[archived], gnu.org, 2009-10-08.
