Twitter just released a great little piece of legal hackery that is a great thing on its surface.
Basically, it shows that Twitter promises not to use its patents for evil (ie: suing another company) but instead only for defensive purposes (an unfortunate reality in our current software patent vs innovation climate).
It has a neat way of ‘enforcing’ this even after the patents are sold away from Twitter. It gives the original patent inventor (which is different from the patent holder, as most inventors don’t hold the rights to their patents when they work for corporations) the ability to unilaterally give the entity being sued a license to use the patent. In doing so, effectively making any lawsuit null and void.
However, there is a huge loop-hole here: All a company needs to do is acquire a few patents from Twitter (every company goes into hard times, trust me) and find the patents they want to use in a innovation-stopping lawsuit and then pay off the original inventor. That price is probably pretty low, relatively.
What is a real solution? License all your patents for free to everyone under a Free/Open source software model that has a nice “if you sue me I revoke your license” clause (see Apache 2.0 section 3 for a start). That way, no one has to worry about the patents being used for offensive (pun intended) reasons but, you can still use them for defensive reasons if you are sued.
Done and done.