Defensive termination

Licensing of patents
Overviews
Types
Strategies
Clauses in patent licenses
Higher category: Patents, Patent law

Defensive termination is a form of implicit cross licensing of patent or other intellectual property rights. Consider a case where company A licenses patent A to company B. One of the conditions of the license agreement is that if company B should ever sue company A for infringing one of company B's own patents, such as patent B, then Company A can terminate the license to patent A. Thus company A would be able to counter sue company B for infringing patent A. This is a strong incentive to prevent company B from suing company A for any future patent it might receive after it has licensed patent A.[1]

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, for example, has a defensive termination clause built into its "Eco-Patent Commons".[2] The Apache 2.0 License also includes a defensive termination clause.[3]

  1. ^ "Lawrence Rosen, "Defining Open Standards", p 5" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-05-13. Retrieved 2008-03-21.
  2. ^ "Eco-Patent Commons Overview". Archived from the original on 2008-03-19. Retrieved 2008-03-21.
  3. ^ "Apache 2.0 license". Apache.org. Archived from the original on 2004-04-02.