What is the Right Patent Policy?

Jeremy asks: "I am drafting a policy for my employer's patents and software. My employer is unwilling to do away with software patents altogether, but I believe that there are benefits in restricting our patents' enforcement. Comments on our draft of a policy and opinions on what the business advantages of both sides are greatly appreciated."

Patent Policies

[Bouncings]

It seems to me that the biggest problem with these patent policies is that like privacy policies, that can easily become empty promises. If they were serious about not stepping on the toes of other hard working programmers, they would not have a policy on inforcement, but have a license. Grant the community a license with a list of terms in the license. I'm not a lawyer, but I would see it working similar to a license agreement for software. You can take it or leave it.

Patent policies are like proprietary software companies just promising that they won't sue you if you copy the program. Back it up with a real license, so there's no unisys/GIF-patent like back stabbing of a community. The fact that this company would want a software patent in the first place shows their low ethical standards.

No half-truths

[Arallok]

1) We shall never sell or give away any personally identifying information, including name, address, e-mail, or phone number, without a customer's permission.

You should not give away any of the information period.
There are too many shady businesses that practice providing "helpful" pre-checked boxes in html forms that sign away your information.

let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

your employer owns all rights to the patents and you expect some little piece of paper that you write stating how patents should be used to be obeyed when it comes down to the buck? yeah right. your policy it not legally binding.

Overall

[intermodal]

Overall, it's decent. While I do have issues with the concept of software patents, this seems to grasp the basics of allowing free software to use it for free while non-free will have issues. IANAL, but one thing: If someone were to write GPLed software and it got included in a distribution like Red Hat, for example. How does this factor in?

enforce profit

[littlerubberfeet]

If someone is making money off of YOUR patent, you should enforce the patent. If a company is using your patent to harm you in some way, it should be enforced. Also if they are developing something with the intent to harm.

I think though, that if a person is doing research or developing something for their private use, then leave them alone. Same goes if the are developing for an open-source project.

What if you go under?

[neitzsche]

If MusicRebellion goes under, will any of it's IP revert to the public domain? Could it revert to GPL in the event the company goes under?

No license to free software?

[The Pim]

To free software advocates, your patent policy is probably worthless because it does not grant a no-cost license to implement the "inventions" in free software.

In addition, your policy does not include non-discriminatory pricing, which allows you effectively to exclude some parties from use of your patents.