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These ML patents are damaging the progress of AI research, and also the commercial use of this intellectual progress. One way to attack this would be if resear
by lars 7y ago
These ML patents are damaging the progress of AI research, and also the commercial use of this intellectual progress.
One way to attack this would be if researchers outside of Google and Facebook started patenting their discoveries, but then immediately released all rights to it under a license that's valid for anyone who does not sue offensively. That way if Google wanted to sue for infringing use of invention A, they would themselves immediately be infringing on invention B and C. Quickly any large player would be entangled into a web where any offensive lawsuit is impossible. If we had standardized licenses with these clauses, we could stand a chance to stop this.
- logicchains 7y agoYet when Facebook tried that, there was intense resistance and they ended up giving up.
- lars 7y agoThe react license had "we won't sue you for violating our patents, except if you sue us first.", which entails "if you use this, you can't sue us for violating your patents, because by using this you guarantee that we have material for a countersuit." People felt that this asymmetrically benefited Facebook. You want Facebook to be on the other side of such an agreement. If a license was made that came with an agreement that neither party can sue anyone in an offensive patent suit, it would limit the destructive power of the big players that hold all the patents. If BatchNorm, ConvNets, LSTMs, Dropout, ReLUs or any such essential neural net component came with such a clause, I could see the big players accepting the license, especially since it aligns with their publicly stated claim that they only file patents for defensive purposes.