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Well, step 1 is PR telling the world they can do what they thought they couldn't - use Tesla's patents for free. I'm sure lawyers are busily writing suitable legal agreements as we type, just to clarify obvious concerns. Without that PR, few would be asking permission.
Why wouldn't they get all their ducks in a row before the announcement, though?
Perhaps Tesla relies on trade secrecy as well?
On the other hand, can't patents protect smaller companies? Open sourcing projects and technology has its case-by-case pros and cons. I agree the increase in open source adoption has had a largely positive impact on the development community. But there seems to be a lot of stigma against 'proprietary' as a whole.
How is your company supposed to grow if you can't protect your technology from being easily replicated by competitors?
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Fair enough. I'm emotional. I don't usually cuss when making logical points. What I meant to say is, electric battery technology will move humanity in the right step which I strongly believe will have a big impact on curbing climate change, which I feel is one of the biggest challenges humans collectively face.
OK, that makes more sense. For the record I'm not at all concerned about the climate changing (although I'm very interested in conservation and efficiency in general). Additionally it seems that an electric car is not actually going to emit less whatever than one of these wonderful new four-cylinders unless/until we make like France and build out more nuclear infrastructure. Still, Tesla is doing a lot of good by lea…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf15nMnayXk
On the climate change front, you're probably in disagreement with scientific consensus, but this is not my field of expertise.
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I think it partly an ethical thing. Patents doesn't (most of the time) benefit society, they only create monopolies (which are about as helpful as those in many socialist countries, i.e. not very much). I think Musk cares more about advancing electric cars than suing and squeeze profits out of patent monopolies.
Don't know what you have against socialist countries(ie: most of the G7) but you definitely have monopolies in the U.S.
We definitely have government protected monopolies though, no doubt about that. Tons of them in fact. From defense contractors, to telecom, to banking, to healthcare, and so on. Most major industries are filled with some variation of massive corporations protected from competition by the government.
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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.
Volvo did this with the seat belt.
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If I were Tesla, I'd also request that the licensing party grant a reciprocal bulk license to Tesla as well. Or, barring that, that Tesla reserves the right to revoke the license if you initiate a patent lawsuit against it.
Does there exist such a patent license with no security holes? I would imagine that it would read, “License will be revoked if you 1) Sue me for patent infringement. 2) Sell a patent to a company that sues me for patent infringement (like Intellectual Ventures does). 3) Sponsor the development of a patent, and the owner of the patent sues me for patent infringement. 4) Contract with a patent pool that sues me for pat…
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>This is the precise thing that patents are designed to prevent: to keep the market from turning into a race to see who can outsource most efficiently to China and inundate the public most completely with advertising. I have absolutely no idea how you possibly came to this conclusion.
When you make it easy to copy innovative designs, companies can really only compete on lower manufacturing costs and more advertising.[1] That's why engineering firms pushed for stronger IP protections through the WTO in the 1990's: Chinese and Korean companies were copying the designs of Cisco, etc, and undercutting them on prices because they didn't have any R&D expenses. [1] At least when you're talking about phys…
With Cisco they have a head start on quality or at least the perception of quality, their products are tried and tested. There is also brand value, Cisco is the real deal, it looks dead posh in the rack for 'nobody got sacked for buying IBM' reasons. They also have supply chain advantages, e.g. a dealer network and short lead times for those dealers to get out of stock items. There is also the matter of warranty/returns.
Sure, another company can put together the customer service aspect, however, manufacturing is a very small part of the retail price of a product and it is normally the wider customer service aspects plus brand identity (which includes advertising/marketing) that makes a product succeed in the marketplace.
If you want to learn more about Elon Musk, you can start here: http://everyelonmuskvideo.tumblr.com/
Finally, progress. A great lesson to all!