Twitter today unveiled a bold new commitment that will be made in writing to its employees—the company will not use any patents derived from employee inventions in offensive lawsuits without the inventor's permission.

The move is highly unusual in the technology industry, which is awash in patent lawsuits filed by and against seemingly all of the biggest companies. Twitter has written up a draft of what it calls the "Innovator's Patent Agreement," or IPA, which encourages its developers to invent without the fear that their inventions will be used for nefarious purposes.

Twitter's decision comes a month after a former Yahoo developer complained that Yahoo promised that it would use patents for defensive purposes only, only to use the patents to sue Facebook.

Twitter will put its own promise in writing, theoretically making it a lot more binding than any spoken commitments. Twitter still maintains the right to use patents for defensive purposes, such as in a counterclaim filed to fend off lawsuits launched by others.

"Like many companies, we apply for patents on a bunch of these inventions," Twitter VP of Engineering Adam Messinger wrote in a blog post today. He noted that Twitter does acquire patents, but "we sometimes worry that they may be used to impede the innovation of others."

"The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes," Messinger wrote. "We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended."

Twitter made the announcement during its quarterly Hack Week, in which employees work on projects and tools outside of their daily responsibilities. The IPA will be implemented later this year, and applied to "all patents issued to our engineers, both past and present."

The IPA draft text, posted on GitHub, enables the transfer of patent assignments from the employee to the employer with an agreement that the employer will not assert any claims except in a few exceptions for defensive purposes as defined within the agreement.

Those situations under which a defensive use would be allowed, are "against an Entity that has filed, maintained, threatened, or voluntarily participated in an intellectual property lawsuit against Assignee or any of Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors; against an Entity that has filed, maintained, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against another in the past ten years, so long as the Entity has not instituted the patent infringement lawsuit defensively in response to a patent litigation threat against the Entity; or otherwise to deter a patent litigation threat against Assignee or Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors."

If Twitter wanted to use patents for any other purpose, it would have to "obtain prior written permission from all of the Inventors," according to the IPA's language. The inventors also obtain a royalty-free, irrevocable license to the patents. The exact language of the IPA will probably undergo some revision over the next few months.

With the blockbuster Oracle/Google trial getting under way this week, the technology patent wars are nowhere near over, and will likely continue to accelerate. Twitter's commitment won't change that, but it's a positive step nonetheless.

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