All Our Patent Are Belong To You

All Our Patent Are Belong To You

By Elon Musk, CEO Telsa Motors
Telsa Motors.com
June 16, 2014

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our
Palo Alto headquarters.

That is no longer the case.

They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source
movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable
transport.

If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles,
but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit
others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal.

Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents
were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them.

And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they
serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant
corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than
the actual inventors.

After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just
meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided
them whenever possible.

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of
concern that the big car companies would copy our technology
and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing
power to overwhelm Tesla.

We couldn’t have been more wrong.

The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or
programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the
major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an
average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with
limited range in limited volume.

Some produce no zero emission cars at all.

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100
million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion
cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough
to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the
market is enormous.

Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric
cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars
pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and
the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving
technology platform.

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history
has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a
determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company
to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.

We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents
will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you