Wow, thanks for digging deeper Lin. It certainly sounds like Twitter's strategy is not quite the great emancipatory move it seemed to be. I'd be interested in hearing from our attorney members about this.
Kim --Twitter put out a great press release about their new Innovators Patent Agreement, a self-proclaimed "commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes." Sounds great until you read the fine print and see that a Defensive Purpose as defined in this IPA, if broadly interpreted, would not preclude any assertion of patent rights.
The legalese in this IPA wouldn't do anything to stop Twitter from entering into any of the patent battles in the news (Oracle-Google, Yahoo-Facebook, Microsoft-Barnes&Noble) because of the way the agreement defines Defensive Purposes. According to Section 2 of the IPA, any assertion of claims of the Patents shall be considered for a "Defensive Purpose" if the claims are asserted against an entity that has ever threatened or filed a copyright, trademark or patent lawsuit against Twitter or any of Twitter's users; or has threatened or filed a patent lawsuit against anyone in the past ten years. Since Twitter's user base includes most people who have a computer, almost anyone involved in a patent, trademark or copyright lawsuit with someone who owns a computer, would be fair game because patent litigation against them would be defined as a Defensive Purpose in 2(a). The provisions in 2(c) expand a Defensive Purpose to include those who have never threatened or filed a lawsuit, but to allow the patent to be used for the vague Defensive Purpose of deterring a patent litigation threat.
My favorite part of the agreement is that it is not limited to Twitter's employees. Twitter, in this IPA, is allowing anyone to transfer their IP rights to them. I can imagine an altruistic, idealistic inventor reading the first couple paragraphs of the document (especially "Company and Inventors believe that software patents should be used to make a positive impact in the world"), skipping the rest of the legalize and signing away their IP rights -- believing that this agreement safeguards their invention from nightmarish Sun-Oracle-Java-Google litigation.
Twitter's press release says, "The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers." True, if these engineers and designers are running the company that now owns their IP rights. My advice for altruistic innovators who want to ensure that their intellectual property is only used for the greater good, is to critically read this IPA before signing. This is just my opinion – I'd love to hear a civil litigator's take on this IPA.
... and it is a mess. The right hand doesn't seem to know what the left is doing. Former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Sun founder Scott McNealy don't even agree on on the history of patents relative to Google.
Earlier in this thread, we discussed the propriety of patents being assigned to inventors but becoming, in effect, corporate property. Twitter has just foresworn that traditional model, pledging that employees will retain rights to their inventions.
Quite right. A cash infusion is no substitute for a sound, long-term business model. And once you've sold the family jewels, they're gone. I guess either AOL or Microsoft (or both) saw no value in licensing the patents.
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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
