[Good news on this Tuesday morning:][link]
>The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.
[Software patents are a menace][marco], but it’s understandable for companies to hoard them when the cost for *not* doing so could take down their entire business. This sounds like a pretty reasonable solution. For now.
[link]: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/04/introducing-innovators-patent-agreement.html “Twitter Blog: Introducing the Innovator's Patent Agreement”
[marco]: http://www.marco.org/2011/08/11/patents-cant-be-fixed “Marco: Software Patents Can’t Be Fixed”
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