The Defensive Patent License (DPL) is a

patent license A license (American English) or licence (Commonwealth English) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another part ...

proposed by Jason Schultz and Jennifer Urban, directors of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

as a

patent licensing A license (American English) or licence ( Commonwealth English) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another par ...

equivalent of the

GPL The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first c ...

copyright license. It requires entities licensing their patents under the DPL to license all of their patents under the DPL, with free licenses granted to all other DPL participants. DPL participants remain free to launch patent lawsuits against non-participants. DPL 1.0 was published on November 16, 2013, and a "birthday" celebration held at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

. The Internet Archive was designated as the fiscal umbrella organization until it has its own non-profit entity. It was launched on February 28, 2014 at a conference in Berkeley.

References

See also