In the process of commercialization, the word “patent” has become something of a status symbol. Which is fair, considering the basic road to commercialization is to invent, patent, and produce. But what about copyrights and open-source software (OSS) licenses, which don’t involve patents? These different types of intellectual property warrant special consideration during the commercialization process.
What is a license?
The term “license” comes up quite a bit in the commercialization process. Basically, a license is an agreement between the owner of the intellectual property and the entity that wants to use said intellectual property. The agreement allows the licensee to alter and use the tech per the authority granted to them under the license. If an external company wants to develop software, for example, or use it in tandem with their own technology, the licenser must grant them the right to use the software with a license.
According to Sat Balachander, a licensing associate at OTT, “We look at how the [licensees] will use [the software] and what are we actually licensing it for, and we negotiate those terms.”
It’s easier to understand what a license is by thinking of an apartment owned by a landlord. The landlord gives the new tenants a lease to live in the apartment, granting them full access to the apartment. But the tenants don’t own the apartment, nor can they make permanent alterations, like painting the walls, without permission. The landlord retains the ownership of the apartment even if they are not actively living there.
In summation, licenses are essentially lease agreements for intellectual property. So how does this information pertain to copyrights and open-source software?
Copyright and copyleft
Any form of authorship expressed in a tangible medium, such as research journals or source code, can be protected under a copyright. A copyright allows the owner to choose what happens with the published material.
In reference to software, any copyright pertains to the source code, and the copyright grants ownership to the author. This allows the owner to grant external companies licenses to develop the tech, either exclusively (i.e. only the company granted the license can develop the tech) or non-exclusively (i.e. multiple companies can be granted licenses for the tech, and they can each develop as they see fit).
Copyleft, on the other hand, is a little trickier to commercialize. Copyleft is “a general method for making a program (or other work) free (in the sense of freedom, not ‘zero price’), and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well,” according to GNU.org. In simple terms, copyleft material is made available to everyone, which makes it very difficult to commercialize—if something is already released to the public for free, what’s the point in buying it? If, under the license agreement of the original copyleft material, a programmer uses any copyleft material in their technology or published material, they must also release their tech under a copyleft license.
To summarize this idea, OTT patent counsel Randi Isaacs said that copyleft material “can still be copyrighted, but it limits OTT’s ability to limit others from using that copyrighted material. We can own it, but the OSS license dictates the terms of release.” This inability to limit usage is what makes commercializing copyleft technologies difficult because, as previously stated, why buy something when there’s a free version available?
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, which will discuss open-source software (OSS) licenses and how they impact commercialization.
— Jenna Woods