[plug] Open Patents

[John Clayton]

I have been thinking of Open Patents of late and thought to see what people 
were thinking of the idea on the net. All the references that I found 
regarded making the patent environment safe for open source software instead 
of providing a viral paradigm for promoting the open access to patented 
technologies that the open source paradigm provided for copyrighted works. I 
found this quite disappointing. I would therefore like to promote a 
sufficiently viral paradigm for the open access to patented technologies.

1.1 This paradigm must maintain the profit streams of companies that depend 
on patented ip to survive.

1.2 It must guarantee that anyone that makes an inovative contribution also 
be ably to profitably exploit the discovery.

1.3 It must propagate itself to new patents that are derived from patents 
that are using this paradigm


2 Current profit streams from patented technologies

2.1 Produce and sell the patented technology by itself or packaged with 
other technology that is not inovative enough to deserve patent

2.2 Licence others to produce and sell the patented technology by itself or 
packaged with other technology that is not inovative enough to deserve 
patent

2.3 Licence the patented technology to others that would like to base their 
own patents on the technology


3 Open patents would provide an alternative access for developers of new 
technology

3.1 An open patent licence would permit anybody to utilise the patented 
technology in their own patentable inovation.

3.2 This developer would then be able to produce and sell the resultant 
patented technology and would not have to provide royalties.

3.3 This developer would pay a large percentage of any other income derived 
from this new patent.

3.4 This developer would be required to provide the opertunity to access 
this open patent licencing terms to any other subsequent developer.

3.5 This licence would not restrict the new developer from comming to a 
different agreement with subsequent developers that does not include the 
open patent licence. Keeping in mind that any income from such an agreement 
would be subject to the large percentage going up the chain to the patent 
holder of the technology that their patent is based on.

4 Benefits for the root patent holder

4.1 This paradigm would have no effect on the profit streams based on 2.1 
and 2.2

4.2 Any technology developed from any patents that they provide under open 
patent would then be automatically available for themselves to further 
inovate upon.

4.3 There will be ample opportunity for income derived from 3.3 and as other 
downstream developers also take advantage of this open patent licencing 
terms and discover licencing terms they find profitable even with 3.3 then 
this income stream will increase exponentially.(sort of like pyramid selling 
but since technological development increases wealth there will not be a 
crash, people will always have an ever increasing apetite for technology)

5 The devil is in the details

5.1 When there are multiple open patents within a single inovation a formula 
will be needed to distribute the income from 3.3 up the various tributaries.

5.2 When an inovator wants to include patents that are not open in an 
inovation that includes open patents they will be required to declare the 
closed patent as open or not access the open patent technology under the 
open patent scheme and if they do not have the right to go that then the 
technology represented in the open patents cannot be provided under the open 
patent scheme. This would be allowed by 3.5.

5.3 When there are multiple top level patent holders (patent holders that 
are not restricted in their patent licencing option due to their patents not 
including any patents held by others then there must be an agreement between 
them as to how the multiple patent trees may interact. One simple method of 
doing this would be for all parties to act as iff they were all bound by the 
same open patent scheme even though they are not.

6 The viral nature

6.1 All open patents are automatically available to downstream developers to 
inovate and make a profit from and all their inovations will be open 
patented.

6.2 As the body of open patents increas they will be increasingly 
competitive with collections of closed patents due to the increased sharing 
of inovations.

There are probably a lot of holes in this and probably some significant 
flaws that I cannot see at the moment but I would appreciate your opinion on 
this little idea of mine.

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