Difference between revisions of "Patent License"

Model Patent License

The Model Patent License (final branding has not been decided upon yet) is a simple and streamlined CC legal tool for licensing patents. It was originally developed to enable the standard licensing of patented technologies that have the potential to promote sustainability for the GX project, but Creative Commons will host and maintain it as a standard CC legal tool, so that will be made available for free to any member of the public to use for any purpose even outside of the context of GX.

Goals

The principle goals of the Model Patent License are:

• to facilitate standardized "public offers" to license patents in order to reduce negotiation costs and risks;
• to promote technologies that have the potential to improve global sustainability or public health; and
• to increase the number of patent licenses available for broad categories of innovative and entrepreneurial uses.

Design Considerations

• Non-Exclusive License

This License is a non-exclusive patent license, meaning that the patent owner can grant similar licenses to many parties. In contrast to an exclusive license, which gives exclusive rights to practice and sublicense to a single licensee, a non-exclusive license can be granted independently to many people and companies. This can be fine in situations where the licensee already wants to use the technology and requires no further financial incentives. However, there are situations when exclusive licenses are needed in order to provide an incentive to the licensee to make large financial investments in developing and marketing a product, as often is the case in pharmaceutical development. Therefore, keep this in mind when evaluating the suitability of using this License.

• Fields of Use

By default, the License allows the patent owner to authorize uses in all fields of use (i.e., without any field of use restriction). We deliberately designed the default this way to encourage patent owners to license for the broadest possible set of uses (consistent with our desire to promote innovative uses). However, licensors have the option to specify a particular field of use for the license, which serves to define and delimit the scope of the license. This is specified in the License Data Record. How this field of use is defined is left open-ended and is largely up to the licensor. This flexibility is a deliberate design choice because fields of use tend to vary greatly among licensors and technologies, based on the licensor's business, competitive vision, and future plans, and so forth. However, in the future, we may work with certain industry groups and consortia to develop standard fields of use that apply to particular industry or interest group.

• Fees

The License is free of any fees or royalties by default. We deliberately designed it this way to encourage patent owners to consider making technologies available without fee in order to promote their widespread adoption and use. However, the licensor has the option to require fees or royalty payments in the License Data Record when needed. Due to the great diversity of possible fee and royalty models, we have chosen to leave this open-ended for licensors to define according to their individual needs. However, we strongly encourage licensors to implement fees that are reasonable and non-discriminatory.

• Patent Rights

The licensed patents or patent applications are listed in the License Data Record. Be sure to consider this list in light of the definition of Licensed Patent Rights. In particular, note that daughter applications (like continuations and divisions, as well claims of continuations-in-part that are entitled to claim priority back) are automatically included in the definition of the Licensed Patent Rights, but parent and grandparent applications are not automatically included (and therefore must be listed explicitly). This was done in order to promote greater certainty for both licensor and licensee. For while it is relatively simple through review of a patent file to discover parent or grandparent applications, it is not always possible to discover daughter applications. In addition, there is no way to unambiguously decide what claims of a parent application ought to be licensed, based on the priority rules. For these reasons, licensees are strongly encouraged to perform due diligence with respect the existence of priority patents applications in order to verify they have obtained licenses to all relevant patents owned by the licensor.