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All Our Patent Are Belong To You

teslamotors.com

111–120 of 328 posts

Re: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

#111

I love Elon Musk, and kudos to them for doing this, but it's useful to read between the lines: > Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. This is consistent with my view of how engineers in the traditional disciplines view patents. > At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use th…

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Re: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

#112
post #72
post #27

Assuming that this search represents nearly all of them, that is approximately 133 patents: https://www.google.com/?tbm=pts&gws_rd=ssl#q=inassignee:%22T... Edit: Nice catch, peter_l_downs ... I didn't realize that the estimated search result of 6,430 would be off by such a large factor.

This is not like IBM making some of its less important patents available to the community. This is huge. How many times in the past has a private company opened up its core patents for everyone to use? There aren't that many precedences.

In 1956 AT&T opened all of it's patents to everyone without royalties to settle an antitrust suit, including the transistor.

http://explodingthephone.com/docs/dbx1036.pdf

Re: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

#113

There is no legal covenant here. I imagine Tesla’s definition of “good faith” is “we evaluate on a case by case basis”. Which amounts to “if we like you” and “we reserve the right”. If they wanted these patents to be open source, they would license them explicitly.

I don't see why they wouldn't be willing to talk to the legal department of, say, GM and clarify the exact terms for a license. The blog post is a general statement of intent and the lawyers can discuss specific details as they apply to particular situations.

Re: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

#114
post #111

I love Elon Musk, and kudos to them for doing this, but it's useful to read between the lines: > Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. This is consistent with my view of how engineers in the traditional disciplines view patents. > At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use th…

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The free-rider effect is not a "post-facto rationalization." It's rooted in a strong economic basis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem.

Re: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

#115
If you want to track the death of the cultural vision of Silicon Valley -- the belief that some people, at least, can rise above petty human squabbling and competition and are legitimately working to better humanity -- look no further than this thread. Every top comment is a skeptical one. "This is clearly a great PR move, but has no teeth." "How do you enforce this guarantee?" Etc.

These are reasonable questions, but as Shaw said, all progress comes from unreasonable men. I cannot help but be fundamentally depressed as I read these comments. In my view, Elon Musk has, moreso than any other human except maybe Bill Gates, given every absolute inch of human effort and genius to fight to solve the world's biggest problems. And all we have for him, after benefiting freely from the fruit of his labor, is skepticism. We want more. It's not enough. It's never enough.

Yes, Tesla Motors is a company operating in a media-hyped 2014 America. I know some of you are butthurt that he engages in the same "dishonest" PR tactics that other companies do. GET THE FUCK OVER IT. The end product he's producing will save humanity. That all of America has not rallied behind Musk and Tesla as the most important movement and achievement in the last 100 years of human history absolutely blows my mind.

Not only do we not recognize his goals or his achievements, we actively try and bring him down and shit on his accomplishments. "Well, they invented a pretty cool electric motor, sure, but they were kind of dishonest in that one press release that one time."

Go fuck yourself.

I want to say "I'm done with Hacker News", but we know that's not true. I'm supremely disappointed in all of you. Godspeed, Musk. I thought this was a great announcement, and I'm behind you 100%. I just hope you can finish your work before our shitty, myopic, destructive society tears you down. Here's to faith.

Re: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

#116
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not like IBM making some of its less important patents available to the community. This is huge. How many times in the past has a private company opened up its core patents for everyone to use? There aren't that many precedences.

Not many people have been in the same boat as Tesla, a young company in a trillion dollar industry with limited players. What Tesla is saying, here are my patents, let's start building electrical fuel stations arround the world, i can do a lot of them by myselve (and i'm doing that), but i don't have enough budget to do it arround the world. It seems clear to me, that Tesla's biggest obstacle for electrical cars is e…

You know, that's a good point. Apparently you could build charging stations, using their plug tech, without paying royalties.

That's huge. And smart.

Re: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that an ambiguously-worded blog post would not be legally binding.

You don't think a Judge would have serious issues with the founder and CEO suing someone after saying "hey feel free to use our patents to create legitimate products?"

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Re: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

#118
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, try navigating through – here's the link to page 14: https://www.google.com/?tbm=pts&gws_rd=ssl#q=inassignee%3A%2... . I remember reading or being told that Google only estimates how many results there are, and refines the estimate as you navigate further down the list. As of page 14 there seem to be only 133 results; a far cry from 6,430.

Apparently they don't estimate, they inflate how many results there are... For example, I never seen a case when their "estimate" was lower then the actual number of results.

An upper bound is a valid estimation. "Inflating" assumes that they have a good approximation, and that they arbitrarily increase it. I don't think that they do that.

Re: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

#119
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i read "in good faith" as "you may use these as you wish but don't turn around and try to sue us for using something you hold a patent for" i could be totally off the mark though

I read it more along the lines of "you may use these as you wish but don't try to turn around and screw the electrification of transportation, harming humanity's future for your own short-term gain". Musk isn't doing it for money after all.

Tesla is a public company, Musk is reported to have a 32% stake [1], so is responsible to the other shareholders. If the decision didn't make business sense, he would expect to be replaced as Chairman and CEO.

There may be altruism and mission involved, but Tesla isn't (and shouldn't be) a charity.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Tesla_Motors

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