University of Copenhagen Assumes Stewardship of the Patent Pledge Database

This summer, the Center for Advanced Studies in Bioscience Innovation Law (CeBIL) at University of Copenhagen assumed stewardship and maintenance of the Patent Pledge Database created by Professor Jorge Contreras. The database will be accessible to researchers around the world via the Danish e-Infrastructure “DeiC Dataverse” site, located here, and will be regularly updated by the CeBIL research team.

Patent pledges are voluntary public commitments that patent holders make to limit the enforcement or exploitation of their patent rights. Such pledges have been made for decades and appear in industries ranging from software to automotive to green tech to biotech. Among the more notable of these are Moderna’s 2020 pledge not to assert its patents covering mRNA vaccine technology against producers of COVID-19 vaccines — a promise that some believe Moderna breached, the Open COVID Pledge, in which more than 30 large organizations pledged their patents to the COVID-19 response, the Eco-Patent Commons, in which a number of industrial firms pledged not to enforce their patents covering green/clean technology, Tesla Motors’ famous pledge that “all our patents belong to you” (discussed here), and OpenAI’s 2024 patent pledge

In 2013, Professor Jorge Contreras, then at American University Washington College of Law, began to compile and catalog examples of patent pledges for future study. The database that he created, working with the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) at American University, included the name of each pledgor, the date on which the pledge was made, the full text of the pledge, the pledged patent rights, and a hyperlink to the webpage on which the pledge was first published. In addition, a PDF image of each pledge page was made and linked to the record of each pledge in the (likely) event that the original location disappeared or moved.

The Patent Pledge Database, which by 2020 grew to more than 300 pledges, was hosted at American University through 2024. This year, CeBIL has generously assumed stewardship and maintenance of the Patent Pledge Database. The CeBIL research team, led by Dr. Gabriela Lenarczyk in close collaboration with Professor Timo Minssen, Director of CeBIL, will continue to maintain and expand the database as new pledges emerge across sectors. Professor Contreras, who has been appointed as an Inter-CeBIL Affiliate, will continue his involvement in the Patent Pledge Database. A list of patent pledge-related literature will also be maintained and updated at the site.

We invite inquiries from researchers around the world and encourage the submission of additional pledge records and related literature. We hope that this free online resource continues to assist the international research community.

This post is part of a digital symposium called Innovation, Law, and Ethics in International Bioscience. To read the related posts, click here.

Acknowledgment: The research for this blog post received support from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF) through a grant for the scientifically independent Collaborative Research Program in Bioscience Innovation Law (Inter-CeBIL Program – Grant No. NNF23SA0087056).