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The guys discuss Tesla's decision to go open source with its patents and answer the question, "Our sales people get company cell phones that are for work use only. One of our recently fired employees wants the pictures on their phone. Do I have to give it to them?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business! This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: This is Matt. NASIR: Welcome to… Oh, I forgot, Matt Staub is here. MATT: Yeah, Matt Staub is also here. It’s apparently a one-person show this week. NASIR: So, welcome to Episode 55 where we cover business in the news and also put in our legal twist and also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, sends to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. MATT: Apparently, we allow the co-host to talk at times, but not always. NASIR: Well, I just wanted to try it out to see if it was just Legally Sound Smart Business with Nasir Pasha and then that’s it. I just wanted to see. It has nothing to do with you. I just, you know, I was experimenting. MATT: All right, fair enough, fair enough. Well, tying in some more equality issues, I guess, this is pretty big news that out’s there. Elon Musk – I think that’s how you pronounce his name – the guy who’s involved with PayPal before and now of Tesla amongst other companies, he’s come out and said, “You know what? We’ve got hundreds of patents of Tesla but we’re just going to not go after anyone that wants to infringe on our patents. We’re opening up everything. If someone wants to copy what we do, we do it at such a great efficient rate that it doesn’t matter and that’s that.” You know, this is pretty much the exact opposite of what we’ve seen in the last decade with patent trolls and all that. NASIR: Well, he’s definitely somebody that just tries to do things differently – to his advantage, of course. I mean, people could say that this is a move against the whole patent system in itself but I think the key here, from what I’m reading, is that this may be a move to get his technology on a wider scale. He’s talking to BMW right now to get them to share the cost in developing these charging stations, right? What I found interesting is that it wasn’t specified – at least in any of the media released – how he’s going to actually allow people to do this because there are ways to basically cede your rights to patents through the patent office. They have some kind of procedure for that but I don’t know if he’s going to do that because that’s kind of permanent. Or is he going to kind of make this an open source deal where you have specific licenses? There’s a lot of numbers of ways you can do this. It just depends upon how he wants to control it. MATT: Yeah, I thought about that as well and what he kind of said was Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who in good faith wants to use our technology. So, I don’t know if people are going to be taking his word for it because it’s a little bit risky if that’s the case. NASIR: Yeah, exactly. You’d want something in writing because what if he changes his mind? Is that something you can rely upon legally? I think that’s a little uncertain. But my assumption is that this is recent news and, as time goes along, we’ll figure out exactly what his intentions are and how he wants to release this technology. MATT: Yeah, and I think you’re right as well. Tesla’s doing all right but it has a very small percent of the market so maybe this is going to open things up and make things even better for Tesla even though it’s kind of helping out all your competitors. I mean, it is helping out your competitors, in theory. NASIR: Yeah, I think there’s a reason why you have all these car dealerships on the same road in many different cities, right? It’s because, even if it’s competition, it helps in their sales because, all right, everyone, let’s go to that location and shop around for cars. It actually helps themselves. So, I think it’s kind of the same area.