People Are Open-Sourcing Their Patents and Research To Fight Coronavirus (vice.com) 17
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A global group of scientists and lawyers announced their efforts to make their intellectual property free for use by others working on coronavirus pandemic relief efforts -- and urged others to do the same -- as part of the "Open Covid Pledge." Mozilla, Creative Commons, and Intel are among the founding members of this effort; Intel contributed to the pledge by opening up its portfolio of over 72,000 patents, according to a press release. Participants are asked to publicly take the pledge by announcing it on their own websites and issuing a press release.
"Immediate action is required to halt the COVID-19 Pandemic and treat those it has affected," the pledge states. "It is a practical and moral imperative that every tool we have at our disposal be applied to develop and deploy technologies on a massive scale without impediment. We therefore pledge to make our intellectual property available free of charge for use in ending the COVID-19 pandemic and minimizing the impact of the disease." From there, people and companies are asked to adopt a license detailing the terms and conditions their intellectual property will be available; while pledgers are permitted to write their own license based on their needs, the organizers wrote "Open COVID License 1.0" as a template for immediate use, which grants usage rights to anyone working toward "minimizing the impact of the disease, including without limitation the diagnosis, prevention, containment, and treatment of the COVID-19 Pandemic." The license is effective until one year after the World Health Organization declares the pandemic to be over. Other participants include Berkeley and UCSF's Innovative Genomics Institute, Fabricatorz Foundation, and United Patents.
"Immediate action is required to halt the COVID-19 Pandemic and treat those it has affected," the pledge states. "It is a practical and moral imperative that every tool we have at our disposal be applied to develop and deploy technologies on a massive scale without impediment. We therefore pledge to make our intellectual property available free of charge for use in ending the COVID-19 pandemic and minimizing the impact of the disease." From there, people and companies are asked to adopt a license detailing the terms and conditions their intellectual property will be available; while pledgers are permitted to write their own license based on their needs, the organizers wrote "Open COVID License 1.0" as a template for immediate use, which grants usage rights to anyone working toward "minimizing the impact of the disease, including without limitation the diagnosis, prevention, containment, and treatment of the COVID-19 Pandemic." The license is effective until one year after the World Health Organization declares the pandemic to be over. Other participants include Berkeley and UCSF's Innovative Genomics Institute, Fabricatorz Foundation, and United Patents.
There is no "intellectual property". (Score:5, Insightful)
The copyright and the related "rights" are actually a government-sanctioned, time-limited monopoly that is given to authors and inventors so that they can profit from their invention.
It being extended to infinity is a money grab, which does nothing to help the problems it is supposed to fix.
The only thing that is achieved by extending these monopolies is a perpetual market distortion and a perpetual source of income for the corrupt politicians who work on behalf of the "holders" to keep them from lapsing.
Aren't patents supposed to be open source? (Score:3)
Aren't patents supposed to be open source? that's the whole social contract with a patent isn't it? that you share how it works and you get a license for exclusivity or for re-licensing it how you want but really it's supposed to be "open source" in the first place.. of course nowadays you can't make any invention from the patent application but that's not how it's supposed to be.
free license then isn't open source too. you can have open source without license for anyone to use it. just like a patents supposed to be, a limited time exclusivity in exchange for open sourcing how it works.
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What a gov grants for years a gov can review later and just not grant.
The US gov does it all the time with secrecy orders.
Not much can be done when the US gov arrives with what was something like the Invention Secrecy Act.
What was once called "detrimental to the national security” gets very interesting..
Any gov could do the same now for any emergency medical use and open up any tech for national use.
Re: Aren't patents supposed to be open source? (Score:2, Insightful)
Except in the US, there is no government in the normal sense that we assume. There is a corporate oligarchy that *is* those patent-"owning" corporations, and dons government sheepskin whenever it wants to do something that the sheep would disapprove of, so they can hate "the government" instead, and prevent an actual democratic government from forming.
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If they have the engineering skills and needed IQ of workers.
Many nations sold their production lines to Communist China and invested in imports.
Not much left to start up and work with in many failed nations.
Some smart govs just give their nations private sector vast amounts of gov money and will buy up all PPE and ventilators for years.
Happy patent-"owning" corporations, happy gov, happy per day 24/7
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Yea, pretty much that, most people are on most things on a "don't know, don't care policy" and here we are. Clearly who wrote that open source thing doesn't know how patents work.
Other than that I read that Mercedes's (?) F1 Team (I think) plus some brits put together some breathing aid CPAP device design and they had to start from some expired patents (so 20+ years old?) because of course nobody wants lawyers haunting them, even if they would be to save tens of tho
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This is just an artifact of people not understanding what open source is due to the deliberate efforts of the OSI to confuse the issue.
Open source means you can see the source. Free/Libre means you can USE it. They are making the information not just available, but usable.
I've already provided the citations to back this up repeatedly, they are on my website if anyone is still interested. My peers and I in the community were using the phrase "open source" in this fashion before the OSI was even imagined.
Oh how generous of them! (Score:1)
They pledge not to steal money from a certain subset of people for a limited time.
You're not supposed to steal in the first place!
You're supposed to take money only in exchange for the *actual work* done to research and develop this! Not afterwards, after you have already been paid, anyways! Otherwise I want more money for doing that job in 1999 for you too, that you already paid me for! Regular payments for all eternity please!
Oh wait, let me first buy a law that gives me a monopoly so I can create artific
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Erh... I paid for the research someone does? How? Unless they're researching on government money, someone put his money into this and risked it so that one day he might have some new product to sell.
Care to elaborate on how they already have been paid?
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Erh... I paid for the research someone does? How? Unless they're researching on government money, someone put his money into this and risked it so that one day he might have some new product to sell.
Care to elaborate on how they already have been paid?
~Opportunist
User name checks out. Or as it was once said on a snotty site, Eponymously.
The answer is there in the Heading: People.
Patents are rarely 1 Idea = 1 Product anymore, and I know you know that. Licensing can prevent products from coming to market through speculation of a desired margin.
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Research is based on other research, a large percentage of which is done at public universities which are partially publicly funded.
You literally paid for that, at least in part.
No thanks (Score:2)
The license expires one year after the WHO declares the pandemic over. Which means this is a monopoly grab play. Standard pre-existing MIT/Apache or GNU license or bust.
Here is an example of a vaccine design released under the Apache license https://github.com/feraliscatu... [github.com]
Stay healthy (Score:1)