Patent pool

A patent pool is a legal trust that owns patents. It must have some governance organization to actually make decisions about administering these. MIT and the Government of China run the largest known patent pools. A much smaller pool is the open patent pool which are licensed to "everybody".

Major issues with such pooling are:

• globalization has not made patent law the same globally, yet, so there are country-specific concerns, especially
• mandatory patent licenses and how one may or may not discriminate among users or types of use under the laws of different countries
• required reintegration of improvements, which have a very specific legal definition in patent law and again may be different in each country
• consortium license interaction with the above, and any patent or other instructional capital held or developed or shared within contributor corps
• who holds the patents in a shared source arrangement, e.g. does it all just end up with Microsoft, even though many people's creativity goes in?

Whether to have such a pool or requirements in Consumerium License is up to the Consumerium Governance Organization, like other license constraints.

A patent pool tends to make a consortium very easy to form. There are signs that this approach is paying off, e.g. the new Chinese EVD standard:

• http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/emergingtech/0,39020357,39117430,00.htm