Microsoft Corp. is telling partners that it works with on new products that they don’t need worry that it might one day decide to compete against them.

In a blog post Wednesday, Microsoft President Brad Smith said that companies with which it works on joint ventures will be able to keep the design and patent rights for whatever technologies they might create. The new stance, part of Microsoft’s Shared Innovation Initiative for intellectual property, is designed to alleviate partner’s concerns that the company may one day use its knowledge to build a competing product.

The move comes at a time when big tech companies are increasingly collaborating with others in areas such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Microsoft, for example, is partnering with a company called Adaptive Biotechnologies to use AI to help decode the human immune system to treat disease.

“As collaboration like this between tech companies and their customers increases, so will the questions regarding who owns the patents and resulting intellectual property,” Smith wrote. “There is growing concern that without an approach that ensures customers own key patents to their new solutions, tech companies will use the knowledge to enter their customers’ market and compete against them — perhaps even using the IP that customers helped create.”

Typically, when two companies in a joint venture create a product, they hold onto those rights and create licenses for customers to use it. Microsoft did much the same, but it said problems sometimes arise because it’s not clear which company owns the rights to that technology. Should either party in the joint venture feel there has been a copyright violation, that could lead to expensive and time-consuming litigation.

The technology industry has had more than its fair share of legal disputes around IP, and Microsoft has apparently decided that enough is enough. From now on, the company will give its partners full rights to whatever technology they codevelop, providing much greater clarity on ownership.

Microsoft has already acted on its new policy, handing over the full ownership rights of an AI-powered app that collects data from a surgeon’s hands during operations to the South Korean hospital with which it built the technology.

Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., called the move an interesting approach that could prompt enterprises that are IP-sensitive to cooperate more with Microsoft. But he noted that although it’s fair that Microsoft retains a stake in the IP since it’s providing the platform on which it’s built, it also means it’s not entirely in the partner’s hands. “This may not work for every enterprise – especially those who want a combination of platform and project that truly differentiates them,” he said.

Microsoft will also assist its partners when they come to file patent applications for new technologies they invent. The only condition is that Microsoft be granted a license to use the technology itself.

The new initiative builds on Microsoft’s Azure IP Advantage program introduced last year, which makes more than 10,000 of its patents available to customers so they can defend themselves against “baseless patent lawsuits.”

Image: Microsoft