| Licensing ofpatents |
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| Overviews |
| Types |
| Strategies |
| Clauses in patent licenses |
Higher category:Patents,Patent law |
Patentleft is the practice of licensingpatents (especiallybiological patents) forroyalty-free use, on the condition that adopters license related improvements they develop under the same terms. Copyleft-style licensors seek "continuous growth of a universally accessible technology commons" from which they, and others, will benefit.[1][2]
Patentleft is analogous tocopyleft, a license that allows distribution of acopyrighted work and derived works, but only under the same or equivalent terms.
TheBiological Innovation for Open Society (BiOS) project implemented a patentleft system to encourage re-contribution and collaborative innovation of their technology. BiOS holds patented technology for transferring genes in plants, and licenses the technology under the terms that, if a license holder improves the gene transfer tool and patents the improvement, then their improvement must be made available to all the other license holders.[3]
The open patent idea is designed to be practiced byconsortia of research-oriented companies[4] and increasingly bystandards bodies. These also commonly useopen trademark methods to ensure some compliance with a suite of compatibility tests, e.g.Java,X/Open both of which forbid the use of the mark by the non-compliant.[citation needed]
On October 12, 2001 theFree Software Foundation and Finite State Machine Labs Inc. (FSMLabs) announced aGPL-compliant open-patent license for FSMLabs'software patent,US 5995745 . Titled the Open RTLinux patent license Version 2, it provides for usage of this patent in accordance with the GPL.[5]
