FLC | Sandia joins Open COVID Pledge to provide patent access

Sandia joins Open COVID Pledge to provide patent access

April 21, 2020

Sandia National Laboratories is the first federal lab to join the Open COVID Pledge by making 70% of its patents freely available to the public for use in the fight against COVID-19. Amazon, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM, and Microsoft joined Sandia in making the pledge on April 20.

Together, the group holds hundreds of thousands of patents and is offering to grant a temporary license that enables the public to utilize any of the pledgors’ patents in the research, development, and deployment of medical equipment, network products, software solutions, and other technologies to assist in this urgent public health crisis.

The Open COVID Pledge, launched on April 7 by an international coalition of legal experts, scientists, and technologists, is an effort that encourages companies, universities, and researchers to make their intellectual property available free of charge for use in ending the COVID-19 pandemic and minimizing the impact of the disease. Those who make the Pledge help ensure that uncertainty around intellectual property rights will not slow or impede urgently needed solutions in this critical time.

“This isn’t just a public health crisis; it’s also an economic crisis,” said Susan Seestrom, Sandia’s chief research officer. “Companies need new ways of doing business. They need cybersecurity tools so they can operate remotely. They need advanced manufacturing techniques to produce goods that are in high demand. If Sandia intellectual property can help, we want to lower barriers to people getting it.”