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Defensive Patent License
What this entry documents is not a solution.
This practice may be ineffective or useless in the long term.
ESP's position is that abolition of software patents is the only solution.
The Defensive Patent License (DPL) is a project being worked on by Jason Schultz and Jennifer Urban, two law professors at UC Berkeley. It was first publicly discussed at a conference on May 7th 2010. Despite the name, it proposes a membership organisation, not a licence.
Overview
None of the details are finalised, but points being discussed include:[1]
- Member companies would have to commit all their patents. Not just a chosen set, not just the patents of one department/affiliate of the company. (This aspect is still the subject of a lot of discussion)
- Members give all other members an irrevocable licence to freely use their patents.
- Members can leave, but this would not cancel the licences already granted during their membership.
Related pages on ESP Wiki
External links
- LWN.net article, discusses the DPL from the 9th paragraph onward, April 30th 2010
- The Defensive Patent License makes patents less evil for open source, May 7th 2010
- By Florian Mueller:
References