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: