In 2014 Tesla issued an announcement "All Our Patent Are Belong To You". A question was posted recently on law.stackexchage.com regarding this.
My question, that may or may not be on-topic here, is what kind of infringement defense would "I am infringing a Tesla patent but they put out an announcement that said anyone could"?
Note that the "pledge" is conditioned on the infringer being in good faith.
From a legal standpoint, should Tesla decide to enforce their patents, I imagine the lawsuits would be dismissed at some point (perhaps in trial) because of the announcement you refer to. Users and companies believe that they are allowed to practice the patented inventions, so any lawsuit filed by Tesla would be in bad faith in my opinion. Good faith and bad faith are of great importance in patent infringement cases all over Europe, I am not sure whether that also happens in the US.
