Tesla CEO Elon Musk made the extremely unusual announcement today that he would give away the company's entire patent portfolio to anyone, as long as they agreed not to engage courtroom battles over intellectual property.

“Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology,” Musk wrote in a blog post.

Musk, a South African-born Canadian-American serial entrepeneur and inventor, said Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the development of sustainable transport and that the best way to do this was outside of a court room.

"If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal," Musk said.

“Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.”

He said patents were too often used to "merely stifle progress, to entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession", rather than the actual inventors, and that Tesla initially created patents in fear of bigger old-school car companies copying its technologies then using their weight to overwhelm the company.

“We couldn’t have been more wrong,” Musk said.

The decision means more collaboration from these big car companies with Tesla becomes possible. The company, founded in 2003, already makes electric systems for Daimler and Toyota. 

The move was also driven by global climate inaction, and Musk says the car industry is a major contibutor and is fast becoming too big to control.

“Annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars,” he wrote.

“Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.”

Seven years after Tesla introduced the Roadster electric sports car electric cars still make up less than 1% of U.S. sales.

"We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform," Musk said,

"Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.

"We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard."

For more information see Musk's blog post.