
The Patent Pledge - tathagatadg
http://thepatentpledge.org/
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mooneater
Looking at the names I assume these companies dont have a lot of patents.

Small companies with few/no patents have strong motivation to join (the
possibility of limited protection for free) and nothing to lose by doing so,
since they have few or no patent rights to assert.

Big companies with lots of patents have little to gain, since there are a very
small set of patents on the list. They have lots to lose: the inability to use
their big investment in IP in a competitive way.

So why would holders of large patent portfolios want to join this? Chicken,
meet egg.

Btw, I detest sw patents too.

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pg
They all honestly hope to be big though. So it is a significant step for them
to commit to something like this.

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mooneater
A more general scheme might be, pledge to not assert software patent rights,
against any other entity who as also taken the same pledge.

That seems less biased, more equally attractive to large patent holders.

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azakai
This is a positive idea, but I think it should be done somewhat differently.
I'm not sure the size of the company is the main factor. Instead, I would like
to see something like

> No use of software patents against open source code

Companies could then protect themselves from patent lawsuits by open sourcing
their code, which makes sense since everyone benefits from open source code.

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bsphil
>which makes sense since everyone benefits from open source code.

Companies (and people in general the last 30 years) have not concerned
themselves with doing things to benefit everyone. I'm sure open sourcing code
would be better overall, but I don't see that happening with most major
software.

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DaveMebs
Corporations are legally required to act in the best interest of their
shareholders. If something benefits the company at the expense of humanity,
they are required to act against the best interests of humanity.

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arto
Signups may be slow as long as the app is requesting unnecessarily broad OAuth
access to signees' Twitter accounts:

"This application will be able to: read Tweets from your timeline; see who you
follow, and follow new people; update your profile; post Tweets for you."

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Harj
Twitter only seems to give you three options to choose from: Read, Read and
Write, Read and Write and access direct messages. I used Read and Write for
this app. Is there a way to be more granular and just request permission to
tweet and is that going to have a notable effect on the speed of the app?

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arto
I meant 'slow' as in 'slow to trickle in', not as in 'performant'. Concretely:
I love the idea, would gladly have our startup sign the pledge, but I'm not
enthused about giving a third party that level of access to the company's
Twitter account.

I imagine many others will feel the same way, and more so the larger the
company, which could be counterproductive. Perhaps you might consider
accepting pledges with alternate means as well; the existing signees
presumably didn't use the Twitter app for it.

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cellis
I remember reading something about game theory and why things like this never
work. Maybe someone more versed in game theory can explain better?

