Toyota Joins Tesla In Freeing A Bunch Of Key Patents
from the good-for-innovation dept
Last June, Elon Musk and Tesla made some news in freeing up Tesla's patents, hoping to jumpstart the market for electric cars. As we pointed out at the time, this highlighted how patents can, and often do, hold back innovation -- and we hoped that others might take notice. It's taken a while, but at CES this week, Toyota also announced plans to free patents, focusing on the 5,680 patents (including pending patents) it has on fuel cell drive systems. The details still matter, but Toyota says that the patents are all available, "royalty free." The patents seem to cover the whole stack of things necessary to develop hydrogen fuel cell cars -- including the patents for hydrogen stations.Of course, the idea, as with Tesla, is that the market needs to be jumpstarted, and that means a lot of companies working together to help build the infrastructure and educate the market. That's done best by sharing the information and letting everyone compete on the actual execution. But, of course, that's what we've been arguing should be the case for lots of technology areas as well. The patents are only serving to hold back so many markets, not allowing companies to build the best possible products they can, and thus limiting overall innovation and adoption.
Hopefully more companies -- and not just automakers -- will start to recognize why this is such a good idea, not just for their own business, but for innovation in general.
Filed Under: competition, cooperation, ecosystems, fuel cells, hydrogen fuel cells, innovation, patents
Companies: tesla, toyota