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Description
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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. Originally compiled by Prof. Jorge L. Contreras (University of Utah) and now curated by the Center for Advanced Studies in Bioscience Innovation Law (CeBIL) at the University of Copenhagen, this dataset offers the most comprehensive public record of patent pledges to date. The database covers more than 300 pledges spanning software, telecommunications, green technology, automotive, biotechnology, medical devices, and AI. Each record includes:
- Pledgor name
- Date of pledge (exact or best‐estimate)
- Excerpt of the pledge text
- Patent families / technologies covered
- Pledge type (e.g., non-assert, FRAND-style)
- Source URL
- Tracking number (an ID that matches the filename of the archived snapshot
capturing the pledge as it appeared online)
Available for download
- Master spreadsheet of all pledge metadata
- PDF, PNG snapshot or MP4 of each pledge at time of collection
The CeBIL research team, led by Dr. Gabriela Lenarczyk in close collaboration with Professor Timo Minssen (CeBIL Director), will update the dataset quarterly and welcome community submissions of new pledges or errata. (Initial public release: V1, June 2025; subsequent versions will follow Dataverse semantic-versioning conventions.)
Patent Pledge literature
- Jorge L. Contreras, Patent Pledges as Portfolio Management Tools: Benefits, Obligations and Enforcement in A Modern Guide to Patenting. Challenges of Patenting in the 21st Century, Nicholas Thumm & Knut Blind (eds.), Edward Elgar (Jun. 2025), link
- Gabriela Lenarczyk, Mateo Aboy, OpenAI's Patent Pledge: A Post-Moderna Analysis, Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice 006 (2025), link
- Jorge L. Contreras, Voluntary Intellectual Property Pledges and COVID-19 in Intellectual Property, COVID-19 and the Next Pandemic, Haochen Sun & Madhavi Sunder (eds.), Cambridge University Press (Dec. 2024), link
- Gabriela Lenarczyk, Timo Minssen, Mateo Aboy, The nature, scope and validity of patent pledges, Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice 805, 19(11) (2024), link
- Gabriela Lenarczyk,Patent pledges na tle polskich instytucji prawnych, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem licencji otwartej [‘Patent Pledges in the Context of Polish Legal Institutions, with Special Emphasis on Licences of Right’ book written in Polish] Publishing House of ILS PAS (2024), link
- Gaétan de Rassenfosse, Alfons Palangkaraya, Do Patent Pledges Accelerate Innovation?, Research Policy 52(5), (2023), link
- Jorge L. Contreras, No Take-Backs: Moderna’s Attempt to Renege on Its Vaccine Patent Pledge, Bill of Health blog, Aug. 29, 2022, link
- Richard Li-dar Wang, Chung-Lun Shen, Tung-Che Wu & Wesley Wei-Wen Hsiao, A concise framework to facilitate open COVID pledge of non-disclosed technologies: In terms of non-disclosed patent applications and trade secrets, Journal of the Formosan Medical Association, 121(8), (Aug. 2022), link
- Jorge L. Contreras, The Open COVID Pledge: Design, Implementation and Preliminary Assessment of an Intellectual Property Commons, 2021 Utah L. Rev. 833 (2021), link
- Ginevra Assia Antonelli, Maria Isabella Leone, Riccardo Ricci, Exploring the Open COVID Pledge in the fight against COVID-19: a semantic analysis of the Manifesto, the pledgors and the featured patents, R&D Management Special Issue: Providing solutions in emergencies: R&D and innovation management during Covid-19, 52(2) (2022), link
- Jorge L. Contreras, Michael Eisen, Ariel Ganz, Mark Lemley, Jenny Molloy, Diane M. Peters, Frank Tietze, Pledging Intellectual Property for Covid-19, 38 Nature Biotechnology 1146 (2020),link
- Jorge L. Contreras, Deconstructing Moderna’s COVID-19 Patent Pledge, Bill of Health blog, Oct. 21, 2020, link
- Jorge L. Contreras, Pledging Intellectual Property for Distributed Design in Viral Design – The COVID-19 Crisis as a Global Test Bed for Distributed Design (Distributed Design Platform, 2020), link
- Jonas F. Ehrnsperger & Frank Tietze, Motives for Patent Pledges: A Qualitative Study, CTM Working Paper Series, University of Cambridge (2019), link
- Jonas F. Ehrnsperger & Frank Tietze, IP Pledges, Open IP or Patent Pools? Developing Texonomies in the Thicket of Terminologies, CTM Working Paper Series, University of Cambridge (2019), link
- Jorge L. Contreras, Bronwyn H. Hall & Christian Helmers, Pledging Patents for the Public Good: Rise and Fall of the Eco-Patent Commons, 57 Houston L. Rev. 61-109 (2019), link
- Jorge L. Contreras, The Evolving Patent Pledge Landscape, CIGI Papers No. 166, Apr. 3, 2018, link
- Natacha Estèves, Open models for patents: Giving patents a new lease on life?, The Journal of World Intellectual Property, 21(1-2) (Mar. 2018), link
- Jorge L. Contreras & Meredith Jacob (eds.), Patent Pledges: Global Perspectives on Patent Law’s Private Ordering Frontier, Edward Elgar (Mar. 2017), link
- Catharina Maracke & Axel Metzger, Playing Nice with Patents: Do Voluntary Non Aggression Pledges Provide a Sound Basis for Innovation?, 17 N.C. J.L. & Tech. 483 (2016), link
- Bassem Awad, Global Patent Pledges. A Collaborative Mechanism for Climate Change Technology, CIGI Papers No. 81 (Nov. 2015), link
- Jorge L. Contreras, Patent Pledges: Middle Ground Between the Public Domain and Patent Exclusivity, 2015 Mich. St. L. Rev. 788-792 (2015), link
- Jorge L. Contreras, Patent Pledges, 47(3) Ariz. St. L.J. 543-608 (2015), link
- Jorge L. Contreras, Tesla Motors and the Rise of Non-ICT Patent Pledges, Patently-O blog, Jun. 16, 2014, link
- Jorge L. Contreras, Samsung Proposes a Patent Pledge to Settle EC FRAND Investigation, Patently-O blog, Oct. 21, 2013, link
- Jorge L. Contreras, Non-SSO Patent Commitments and Pledges, Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog, Oct. 14, 2013, link
- Diane M. Peters, Understanding Patent Pledges: An Overview of Legal Considerations, Open Source Development Labs, Inc. (2006), link
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