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发帖数: 9032 | 1 www.teslamotors.com
All Our Patent Are Belong To You
By Elon Musk, CEO
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. |
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