[gregcohn]

Twitter has made this announcement:https://blog.twitter.com/2012/introducing-innovators-patent-...

I haven't seen too many others following suit.

My guess is it's similar to putting land development rights into an environmental conservancy -- if binding on a company, it impacts its valuation.

[dylanbathurst]

Ah, that's pretty cool. When I worked at Zappos/Amazon they had a similar approach to patents. They patented a lot of our code, but promised to only use it for defensive purposes. Which makes sense because we got sued a lot.