June 16, 2014—Tesla Motors created a stir last week when it gave competitors permission to use all of its patents.
In a blog post from founder and CEO Elon Musk, Tesla announced that it would not initiate patent lawsuits against those who use their technology in “good faith.”
“When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them,” Musk wrote. “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.”
Musk continued to say that he created Tesla Motors to, “accelerate the advent of sustainable transport,” and that pursuing lawsuits against companies who share that goal would work against that mission.
“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,” Musk said. “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.”
The full blog post is available on Tesla’s website.
