GreenXchange

» see greenxchange.cc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Davos, January 2010. Nike used its platform at the World Economic Forum to launch GreenXchange, a website where a company could publish one of its patents together with a license saying in advance who was allowed to use it and on what terms. The idea rested on a known fact about corporate patents, which is that most of them sit unused while the thing stopping anybody else from using them is the cost of asking. A standing public license removes the asking.

Creative Commons built the license layer, the same organization that had done the equivalent job for photographs and text a decade earlier. The simplest option on offer was a pledge not to assert the patent against non-profit research, which meant a university lab could work on patented material without a lawyer in the room. Above that sat a royalty-free commercial license, with a paid variant that let the owner attach a fee or fence off a field of use. That paid tier was where most of the commercially interesting patents were always going to end up.

Nike listed over four hundred of its own patents. The flagship was an environmentally preferred rubber formulation, a real compound from a real shoe, offered out to competitors. Best Buy came in as a founding partner, and the list of sponsors funding the Creative Commons work on it ran through Yahoo! and Mountain Equipment Co-op. For about twelve months this was a widely written-up story about how corporate intellectual property might work differently.

On January 11, 2011, GreenXchange held an in-person meeting it called a Collaboratory. Brooks and New Balance came. So did two Pacific Northwest universities and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the agenda was technical help for footwear companies licensing that rubber patent. It was a real event with real attendees, and it was also the last thing GreenXchange ever reported on its own website.

~ the record ~

~ what davos bought ~

The structural problem with a patent commons is that it needs patents, and patents belong to legal departments whose entire function is to not give things away. Nike could fill the shelves because Nike had decided to, at board level, in public, with a chief executive standing behind it. Nobody else arrived at the same size. An academic paper written afterwards about the experience put it carefully: the exchange appears not to have lived up entirely to the original expectations set out at its creation.

Nike's own later statement about GreenXchange said the company had gained significant insights from the collaboration which continue to inform its strategy on sustainability innovation. That is corporate language for an experiment that taught them something and then stopped. There is no evidence anyone was punished for it, and the sustainability work at Nike carried on in other forms. What did not carry on was the website.

~ the slow stop ~

The Internet Archive holds the whole slow stop in its capture log. From late 2010 through early 2014 the front page of greenxchange.cc keeps coming back at roughly four and a half kilobytes, the same page every time, its "Latest News" column still topped by that January 2011 meeting. The last working capture is February 3, 2014. The next one, March 16, 2014, is three hundred and fourteen bytes of HTML wrapping a GoDaddy parking iframe. Nothing in between said goodbye, because by then there was nobody left on the project to say it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »