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Revision as of 19:16, 4 January 2010

(Note: Risks of supporting partial solutions)

Defensive patent pools is a proposal to reduce the harm of software patents to a specific group of software developers. On the plus side, there's no need to change legislation or gamble on a court case, but on the negative side, they can only solve a very small part of the problem.

The most common goal is to protect developers of free software (such as GNU/Linux), so this article will use that example.

The idea

The general idea is that a group of patent holders who are friendly towards free software can "pool" their patents together and agree that these patents won't be used against free software developers, and that these patents may be used for counter-sueing any patent holder that threatens free software developers.

Limits to effectiveness

  1. Most large patent holders already have non-aggression agreements with the other large patent holders, so this limits the utility of the pooled patents for counter-sueing.
  2. The members of the pool are, by definition, not the patent holders that we are afraid of.
  3. Counter-sueing only works if you are being sued by a company that develops software. There is nothing that defensive patent pools can do against patent trolls (litigation companies that don't develop software).

Examples

Open Invention Network is the best known example.

Related pages on ESP Wiki

External links