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Just curious, is there some sort of GNU for patents? If I were going to not patent my invention I'd want some way to make sure nobody else came along, filed for some trivially new derivation, and then managed to extract most of the value of the original invention.

Maybe some central licensing organization that would license patents for free as long as the licensees agreed to some GNU-like terms... or is this not an issue in patent law?

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As vidar mentioned in a different thread of this story[1], prior art plays a large part in this process.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1797836

But prior art doesn't have the viral effects of the GNU licence. This would be an actual patent, but with licensing terms that required anyone creating derivatives to either release them or to patent them under comparably-free terms.

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