Thought I'd share this site with you - the Eco Patent Commons was set up on January 2008, and is hosted on the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) website.
Interesting idea - the rationale is to create a way for companies (or IP owners) to share patents for usage to enable energy efficient and environmentally sustainable processes to be adopted widely and quickly. Also, companies in similar industries can share and improve on each other's processes.
Why not publish the invention and make it public domain and free for all? I suppose this is a way of allowing the company to still exploit their monopoly on the IP for other uses or if it starts to have large commercial potential in the future, yet still get the environmentally friendly applications out there and used quickly.
The legal side of this is a bit difficult to understand in parts - especially the idea of when the non assert clause can be revoked should a company sue you for something else unrelated to the usage of the eco-patent. I would have thought an easier way of doing this would be to give a royalty free license to other companies to use the patent for the stated purpose only, but there may be legal implications to this I just don't understand. I assume this also is based on the Creative Commons, which I know even less about - maybe the Eco Patent Commons is based on some tried and tested legal systems used there.
Anyway, have a surf around the site to see examples of which patents have been pledged to the commons so far (31, mostly from IBM) - the Q&A section is quite good at clarifying some bits.
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