copyleft patent license for computational quantum chemistry?

[Mark Shewmaker]

On Wed, Oct 13, 1999 at 12:52:53AM -0400, Justin Wells wrote:
> 
> With general public involvement, they would still want to acquire
> a patent, but it would be an "open patent"--existing only as a

I've been working on something like that at www.openpatents.org.
(It's still in the initial stages.)

I am aiming for a one-size-fits-all patent license that could be
made to be suitable for any field.  I welcome any feedback.

> I described the GPL to one of the principals in the project, and they seemed
> pretty interested in the copylefting concept. The public license for the 
> patented method would then demand that any derived method be made public, 
> and subject to the license of the original patent. 

That's exactly the idea I want to promote.

> Does there exist something with a copyleft which would be suitable for 
> patents in traditional, non-software fields of research?
>
> Thoughts? Suggestions? Pointers?

You might want to subscribe to the Free Software Business list,
fsb-subscribe at crynwr.com, which has discussed this sort of thing before,
mostly from a software patent point of view, but most of the discussions
are applicable to patenting in general.  Archives are at
ftp://ftp.crynwr.com/pub/fsb.  (Look far back in the archives.  You'll
find more discussion over 6 months ago than recently.)

You might also want to look at www.openppc.org and the archives of
its mailing list.  (Participants in the Open PPC project aim to design
and build a free Power PC based motherboard.)  Hardware licensing
discussions on the openppc mailing list have tended to be more specific
to computer hardware, and not immediately applicable to your case above,
but they should still prove helpful.

 -Mark Shewmaker
  mark at primefactor.com