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Announcement: Lotus Green Data Centers forgoes economic protections of patenting
There are new opportunities developing in the evolving intellectual property (IP) laws, such as with patents. Global innovation initiatives are being hampered by the traditional application of protectionist patents. The problem resembles the opposing pressures of early open-source initiatives in the realm of proprietary code copyrights. Companies positioned for leadership in their industry are realizing the savings in advancing global innovation[1], and how it can outweigh the potential revenue from royalties of licensed patents (and the costs of licensing and enforcing them) as well as harm to potential customers that would be negatively impacted by paying patent fees.
Lotus Green Data Centers will release design documents under creative commons licensing, including the TAPR Open Hardware License , and forego traditional patent protectionist strategies by using defensive disclosure techniques of publishing designs and methods for the public domain.
Simply publishing patentable material ( Defensive publication ) is one way to release patentable material for the commons.
1. Santos, Jose, Doz, Yves, and Williamson, Peter. "Is Your Innovation Process Global?" Summer 2004, Vol 45, No. 4, pp 31-37. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2004/summer/06/