“All Our Patent Are Belong To You”

Word for word, "All our patent are belong to you" is the title of the latest blog post by Tesla founder Elon Musk. This is an inside joke for avid gamers, a takeoff on the phrase “All your base are belong to us,” from the 1991 video game Zero Wing, which was originally just a poorly rendered computer translation from the original Japanese which, more accurately, would have been “All your bases now belong to us.” Nevertheless, this inarticulate English phrase soon became an internet meme well known in the gamer community, often abbreviated with the texting acronym AYBABTU.

In his blog post, Musk announced that Tesla has decided to open all of its many patents to free use by anyone, including Tesla’s own competitors in the automotive industry. It was a momentous announcement, somewhat like Microsoft announcing that from now on Windows code would be available to everyone, and Windows software would be open-source.

As significant as Musk’s action is, however, it isn’t unprecedented. “Free revealing” like this involves the uncompensated publication of knowledge or techniques that could in fact be legally protected by patent or copyright. And increasingly, innovative companies use free revealing to hasten the pace of innovation in their category. I’ve written previously about Musk’s free revealing of the technology behind his proposed “Hyperloop” mass transportation idea, and in that previous post I cite a couple of other prominent examples.

A number of organizations have sprung up to help fashion the standards and customs for freely revealing intellectual property that used to be treated as a competitive secret. Creative Commons, for instance, is a “nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools,” and has produced several different licenses for intellectual property that are similar to patents and copyrights but different in important ways. Its “Attribution Share Alike” license, as an example, is the type of license most commonly applied to protect open-source software. It allows others to use and modify your work provided they credit you and they allow others to use their updates or revisions of your work on the same terms. (You can see the logic here: If you create a new patch or write new code for some software application, and you make it freely available to others, you don’t want someone then to incorporate your software into their own update and patent it themselves.)

As the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, more and more innovations happen in “open source” and “free revealing” contexts, while patents, copyrights, and other legal restrictions on the use of intellectual property seem to be holding us back.

Still, even though free revealing has become more useful to a variety of businesses lately, what Tesla has just done is extremely significant. Other innovative automotive companies (or non-auto companies?) could almost certainly use much of Tesla’s formerly patented information to bring out their own innovations in the all-electric car category. And that’s just what Tesla wants – to bring credibility and permanence to this brand new product category.

This is big, everyone. If you don’t know how big this is, you haven’t been paying attention.

Elon Musk, all my cool are belong to you.

Photo: Tesla Motors