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What about the defensive measure? To defend against being sued. It would be good if Tesla pools the patents with others to form an "open patent" club where all the interested parties can join and use the patent to defend against infringement lawsuits.
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.
Let's see what a mob of similar armed companies will do.
>"If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal"
FFS, change the title back to what it was submitted with! "All Our Patent Are Belong To You" makes no sense out of context. At least the original title said something about Tesla Motors.
This has been discussed a lot over the past few years. The title-changing policy is very widely disliked and leads to a lot of clearly poor results like this, but the mods are completely uninterested in changing it, so there it is. I don't know why we're even allowed to write titles anymore — it may just as well be populated by an automatic HTTP request.
Didn't Twitter declare something similar? Is there anything they can do that's binding outside of a declarative 'we won't sue you unless...' statement?
IIRC, Twitter's approach was to also give the inventor a transferable license to the patent. That way if Twitter used it offensively, the inventor could independently license the patent to the company who was being sued.
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.
They would be on the receiving end of a PR shitstorm if they tried to enforce their patents after publishing this.
I'm curious Mr. Musk, does this mean "Give us a call and we will license you our patents at no cost."?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They would be on the receiving end of a PR shitstorm if they tried to enforce their patents after publishing this.
True, but if you were Gigantic Auto Manufacturer, would you build these patents into a billion-dollar factory without a stronger guarantee that Tesla won't about-face in 5-10 years? I wouldn't risk it.