IBM Launches Licensing Program For 40,000 Patents

IBM announced the decision Tuesday. The program, which IBM is calling "Ventures in Collaboration," will allow startups to work with IBM investors for access to the technology behind the patents.

The program, designed to be simple and affordable, is administered by venture capital groups. It offers two types of cross licensing agreements. One is designed for beginning companies generating less than $10 million in revenue. The other is for later-stage, venture-backed companies with more than $10 million in revenue. Both agreements accommodate startups' accelerated growth cycles and minimize time for negotiations.

The program is designed to encourage creative new uses for IBM patents and reflects IBM's partner-focused business model. In the past 18 months, the company has increased the number of its partnership programs from 20 to more than 950.

Over the past 16 months, IBM has pledged 500 software patents to the open source community, granted open IP access to specific standards bodies and formalized a non-assertion pledge for the Linux kernel.