Cross licensing strategy of big firms

["Benjamin Henrion" <bh@udev.org>]

http://www.itpro.co.uk/applications/features/101743/the-open-source-patent-war/page2.html

"The mechanism for dealing with unintentional infringement of software
patents is cross-licensing. Robert Barr, the patent counsel for Cisco,
told the hearings of the US Federal Trade Commission on "Competition
and Intellectual Property Law and Policy in the Knowledge Based
Economy" in 2002 that: "It makes more business sense to assume that,
despite the fact that we do not copy other company's products, and
despite the fact that we do not derive solutions to problems from the
patent literature, we will be accused of patent infringement. The only
practical response to this problem of unintentional and sometimes
unavoidable patent infringement is to file hundreds of patents each
year ourselves, so that we can have something to bring to the table in
cross-licensing negotiations. In other words, the only rational
response to the large number of patents in our field is to contribute
to it."

--
Benjamin Henrion <bhenrion at ffii.org>
FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-4148403