'Patent Pledge' companies promise not to sue startups into oblivion

In response to the current state of the United States' patent system (and its parasitic twin, the industry of patent litigation), Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has launched what he calls "The Patent Pledge," a brief, thirteen word long statement for technology companies to sign to affirm that they have no interest in suing startups over software.

The Pledge itself is quick, and to the point:

"No first use of software patents against companies with less than 25 people."

Graham says the deliberately vague slogan is intended to read like Google's "Don't be evil" catchphrase, and when a company signs the patent pledge, it identifies them as a company that wants to protect a healthy innovation environment for startups.

"Already most technology companies wouldn't sink to using patents on startups. You don't see Google or Facebook suing startups for patent infringement. They don't need to. So for the better technology companies, the patent pledge requires no change in behavior. They're just promising to do what they'd do anyway. And when all the companies that won't use patents on startups have said so, the holdouts will be very conspicuous," Graham says.

Right now only 18 companies have signed, and they're mostly small to mid-range companies that were startups themselves not long ago, including Airbnb, Disqus, Dropbox, Justin.tv, Loopt, and Wepay.

Though small, it's still a potentially strong grassroots solution to decreasing the number of "innovation killing" patent lawsuits that are a hallmark of the United States' broken patent system.