Protect your freedom to operate with Open Patents
Questier, Frederik
Many people, also software developers, put their inventions or innovations onthe 'market' without filing patents. For good reasons: the patent privilegesto exclude others are not really compatible with freedoms and openness.However, to protect your freedom to operate, you need to avoid that othersfile a patent on your invention. Open Patents are a new way to do this. Software patents are still a threat. When you publish your software code, acompany or a patent troll might file a patent for the inventions in your code.The patent offices should not grant patents for existing knowledge ('priorart'), but they will have a very hard time to find the ideas in your code. Assuch the troll might succeed in getting the patent, and might stop you andeveryone else from further exploitation of your ideas. Patents are a classical protection against patents, but it's an expensive andoverly offensive solution. Defensive publications are another solution. Butthis concept is not well known and doesn't get a lot of recognition. Theestablished implementations are commercial, have a per page publication feeand hide the defensive publications behind a paywall. The DefensivePublications program, a component of Linux Defenders, uses such commercialchannel, but waives the publication fee and republishes openly outside thepaywall. This solution is however for a very narrow (Free software) field andlacks the popularity it deserves. [The Open Patent Office] is a non-profitorganization that aims to stimulate innovation by providing an open, free andsocial alternative to the traditional patent offices. It allows inventors toregister their innovative ideas as open patents. Open patents act as defensivepublications. The Open Patent Office publishes these descriptions, timestampsthem, gives them an open patent number, classifies them, facilitatesdiscussion and facilitates easy searching and finding by patent examiners andthe general public.
 Good morning. I'm Frédéric Bastier. I'm working at the Free University of Brussels, but not this one, not the French-speaking one, but the Flemish fork of it. Main campus being one kilometer from here. I'm one of the founders of the Open Patent Office. And of course, people that love freedom of software and openness are not really so happy with the state-granted monopolies. Patents are state-granted monopolies. Besides the ethical issues, it's also a big problem practically. It's very hard to write software or to even develop a web shop without violating any of these 20 patents covering web shops. Some patents are too stupid to be true. For example, slide to unlock is actually a software implementation of a centuries-old ID. It's not only in the patent in the software world that's a problem. In the medical world, patients are dying. Like Richard Stallman said, if you lobby for patent enforcement on expensive life-saving drugs in poor countries, you should be charged for genocide. In the mobile world, everybody's attacked by others with patents. And if you're a big company, you can probably make a deal with cross-licensing or you can counter-shoot. Quite new problem is actually the patent rolls. You can't make a deal with them. You can't counter-shoot them because they are non-practicing entities. They produce nothing. They sell nothing. So you cannot attack them. Patents are not cheap to obtain. Maybe you say, okay, I don't like patents or they shouldn't be cheap. They should be extremely expensive. But this is a problem for small organizations and individuals. What about fair competition? The big costs, okay, there are renewal, well, there are registration costs for patents. There are renewal costs for patents. And the big cost is your legal cost for a legal advisor to write the patent such that they are not invalidated by prior art. So you don't write too broad, but also don't write too narrow because you want to block the competition as much as possible. Well, probably not you, you, but the organizations that try to get patents. So also patents are written in a difficult legal language nowadays. Okay, it seems that with these costs, together with certainly with litigation costs, actually the average profit of a patent today is less than zero, except in the chemical pharmaceutical sector. And that's because a molecule is easy to define exactly. In other sectors, our stuff is defined more loosely and that raises a lot of more ground for conflicts. So is a patent a good idea for you? Take this into account. So actually patents are a tax on innovation. Some researchers say that at least a tax, that it is at least a tax of around 12% on innovation. In the biomedical sector, some researchers say patents are actually slowing down innovation with around 30%. Also, patents nowadays are too vague to learn from. Patent lovers will say, yeah, patents are a trade-off between giving a little bit of monopoly during a little bit of time, 20 years, for in return getting the knowledge of the companies to avoid that they keep everything secret. And they will say patent databases are huge knowledge databases. Even in my university, patent officers say, don't forget to look for knowledge in the patent databases. But actually, researchers don't do that because patent databases, did you try to read the patent? Patents are almost impossible to understand. So it's time to fix patents. Since long, according to many. So let's see what kind of solutions exist and if this is enough. Thumbs up if you lobby for good patent reform like abolishing software patents. It's a long struggle. If you have patents, a good idea is to join a patent pool, a defensive patent pool. One around Linux is the open invention network. On the picture you see Depp Nicholson with a very active speaker at FOSDEM. There is somebody else from the open invention network in the room. So great idea, there was the previous speaker, another defensive patent pool, a lot network. Good if you have patents. What can you do to avoid patents? You want to avoid that somebody else gets a patent on your ID. I loved this previous speaker mentioning that there was initiative to kill patents before they are granted in the application phase in the US. I hope he's right because there used to be the peer to patent initiative and that is a historic initiative of the United States patent office. So I hope there is still a way to do it during the application phase, but I'm not sure. A quite new initiative is unpatent. They want to crowdsource IDs for invalidating bad patents. So if you think, okay, I don't like that patent, you mentioned them, please attack that patent and then they will do a fundraising. If they have $20,000, they will start the procedure to invalidate that patent. If you don't have a patent yet, but you have a great ID and you bring it to market, be careful. You risk to lose your freedom to operate. If somebody else gets a patent on your ID because they have the same ID or because they see you simply doing it, they could get a patent and they could block you. There was a question at the previous presentation after the presentation, what can I do then? Should I take a patent? Not in this sector, but you could write a defensive publication. Just describe how your ID works. You make an enabling publication and you make sure that the patent offices can find it. So not just on your website because then they will not even trust it that you didn't cheat with the date and so more. But also don't just put it in your code because patent offices are not reading your source code. They are also not trying your programs. So we need something better. There exist commercial initiatives for that. Resource disclosure is a journal. They have around 1,000 publications per year, which is actually nothing compared to the 2 million patents worldwide every year. And they have publication fees per page. So most of these defensive publications are very short to pagers. And they have a paywall for readers. So no open access. Another one IP.com, very similar. 10,000 publications per year, so very small compared to the number of patents yearly. Publications fee and a paywall. A great initiative was a defensive publications project by Linux defenders. They collected with your help defensive publications around Linux software. A little bit broader than Linux only. And they submitted it to IP.com where you have to pay the publication fees, but they did this for free with sponsoring. So no paywall also to read because they republished it. The problem is they only got 156 publications since 2009 and the last one was in January 2015. I mailed them, okay, I love your initiative, but what happened? We want to do something similar. The email came back bouncing. So if there's somebody who knows about this project and the status, please tell me. So none of the current defensive publication solutions have the popularity, the impact, or the openness that the concept deserves. If I talk with, well, actually if you talk with whatever people, for example, in the street and you ask what is a patent, everybody has a quite good idea. They know there's kind of a proof that you invented something. But ask people about defensive publications, even researchers, they don't know. They don't know the concept. They don't know the term. So we need something better. Our proposal is the open patent office, which is a non-profit organization. So we don't ask money for publishing or for reading. And our aim is to stimulate open innovation and to strengthen the public domain. And we do this by combining the best practices of the defensive publications and the patent offices. Patent offices, their strong practices, all that registration, the bookkeeping of at what date was what registered. And open discussions. None of the previous projects added that. With each ID, we add the possibility to discuss these IDs. Because if IDs talk, they become smarter. If IDs have sex, new IDs are being born. So we want to stimulate this. So our motto is, protect your freedom to operate by sharing your IDs. You don't get the full protection of patents, including the aggressive possibilities to block others. But at least you have that defensive protection. Others will not be able to get patents on your ID anymore. So we want to help you with an easy publication process. On the website, you will have a guided web form where you simply mention the title, some information about yourself, or if you desire to stay anonymously, that is possible. Not with patents, but with open patents. Yes, you give an abstract summary, background, problem statement. You mentioned prior art, very important. Patents should also do that, but are sometimes trying to avoid to give the crucial prior art. Given enabling description, that's the most important part. You need to give a full description so that somebody else can implement your ID. Add figures if relevant. If you push the publication button, you get immediate publication. Of course, it's very important that the patent offices will trust us. So we will guarantee the authenticity and the date by a date stamp. And then we can do much better than others by, for example, giving cryptographic hashes of the open patents, cryptographic signatures, block chain is probably overkill, and we can let others do mirroring of our database. We need to make it easy for the patent offices, the traditional patent offices, to find your defensive publications. So we will give them surgeon, giant, tax, and API to integrate their software. But we will also follow the international patent classification. Not easy, even me, the first time when I tried to search for software patents in the national patent classifications, I didn't find them immediately, they are hidden under business methods. We give RSS feeds so that innovators that want to follow something about their own sector can easily do that, and we facilitate, of course, citations. We want to improve the quality because, of course, spammers will also like our platform. So we will stress the importance of having a good enabling description. We will do quality control post publication, and this will probably still need some research on how to do this in the best way. And we will give quality metrics, an open patent that will get more citations, of course, with probably a better open patent than another one. You hear me mentioning open patents, and an open patent is actually not a patent, it's like new is not unique. But the idea is what I said, everybody knows about patents, nobody knows about defense publications, so I think we will be more popular with this little hack. We give it just a more sexy name. And it's all for stimulating open innovation, so we want, of course, open access. We will put a Creative Commons license on the text so that text can be reused, forked, but also that our database can be mirrored by others. The IDs by publishing them with us are in the public domain, so there is no thing like a patent license on these IDs, the IDs are in the public domain. And then we facilitate comments on these IDs, discussions, maybe we enable requests for prior arts and enable requests for solutions for certain problems, but that's not the core business, maybe we can link to initiatives like ask patents and stack it change. Okay. And then we want to empower innovators. Patent holders are very proud of their patents, they're writing their resumes and their CVs, and we want to give something similar. They get a US patent number, a European patent number, with us they will get an open patent number that they can cite everywhere. And we will give rankings like the most active open patent holder. So, actually, open patents are defensive publications, but probably people will mostly like to know how do open patents compare with patents. So, first of all, patents are expensive to obtain, registration and renewable fees, no fees for open patents. Writing a patent is difficult because you need to avoid existing prior art. Writing open patents is very easy because actually this trying to establish prior art is not invalidated by prior art. So, if you forgot something, some prior art, it's not a problem. Patents are often very hard to understand, written in vague legalese. We hope that the open patents will be much easier to understand because you don't have that strategic game of blocking the competition. Right, well, obtaining a patent is a slow process. It can often take a year before you get your patent finally granted. Here you will get immediate publication when you push the publication button. Patents, their protection is territorial. It means you need to ask a patent in every country where you want to have protection. An open patent is, of course, immediately international. If you publish your ID and it can be found everywhere, it will be accepted everywhere as prior art. Of course, patents give you both defensive and offensive protection and open patents only give you defensive protection. So, status, we are in pre-launch phase only. We have a pre-launch website. We are preparing to build for now a prototype website where you can at least file your IDs but not with all the features of the cryptographic hashers and so more in the beginning. Because, of course, this will need funding. We are a non-profit organization. We don't ask publication fees. We will ask donations. If you can help, is it financially or with developing or whatever, if you are an enthusiast, please contact us. Challenges will be besides funding acceptance. Acceptance by innovators. Please help us if you have innovative IDs. Start writing them out. And acceptance by the software, by the traditional patent officers, of course. We need to avoid spam and I'm also a bit worried about all the bullshit and pseudo-scientific submissions that we will get. But the patent officers are also getting them and they are also publishing too often pseudo-scientific patents. If things get multilingual, which they should be, this problem is even going to be harder. How to detect Chinese bullshit. But the patent officers also have that problem. If an ID is published somewhere in Chinese, will an English-speaking patent office always find this? I don't think so. And then writing in the open patents is easy, but putting good metadata on it, especially adding international patent classification, metadata on it is not so easy to do with crowdsourcing. So we're still finding solutions, searching solutions for that. So I'm curious for your questions, your comments, maybe support. You can find us there on your favorite platform, at least the most popular platforms are there. Hello. First to disclaimer, I'm Mokobima, I work with the Open Invention Network. So I'm the guy that said yes, these talks are exactly what we need. One comment up front, I would like us to be aware that we're living in a filter bubble. We are in some form a minority, but we probably all here agree that patents on software are a difficult issue. If you leave FOSTA and you talk to other people in Brussels, you'll get blank stares. I spoke at a conference at the Joint Research Center for the European Commission in March on the dangers of patents on software. In the room of 300 people, I was the only one speaking from this angle. Which means we need to get engaged also with lobbying and with spreading the word. For example, the Economist articles that you quoted do not really support what you're saying. The question comes at the end. They're not called for abolishing the patent system, and there's no consensus that the patent system itself is bad. I think the terminology is important. As you said, defensive publications. The issue with Linux defenders is still there. Nobody's writing defensive publications. This is my question. You said you want to make it more interesting by giving it a better name. Have you got responses from the open source community? We are interested in submitting and writing, because that was our main problem. I spent ages agitating for that, and we never got the responses from that. Good remark. I'm not going to be filter bubble, but on the other hand, I talked a lot with researchers in my universities from different fields, and actually, they are none of, well, I didn't encounter researchers that are fans of patents. Their job is sharing knowledge. So they don't like the restrictions of patents. Of course, what they like is the big money that could come from them, because they are quite realistic. The patent officers in the universities are more optimistic about the possibilities of the patents, and always remind us, don't forget the possibilities of patenting. So, yeah, researchers like this idea, and I have researchers that say, I'm going to start writing patents. For example, the people from mathematics, mathematics is not patentable, and they feel like, why not? And they love this idea, like, okay, I can write out my ideas at least at the open patent office, because we will not restrict anything, because it doesn't harm if you write a defensive publication. So, yeah, I'm optimistic also, because, for example, I talked to some patent attorneys, and they say, okay, only now I get it after your talk about open patent office that actually, we patent attorneys very often have to tell our clients like, okay, for this idea, going for a patent is not the best strategy, and then they do nothing. And then the patent attorneys now think, okay, I should mention more this defensive publication possibility. So, I think, yes, we have 2 million patents worldwide every year. We have around less than a percent defensive publications compared to that. I think we can do much, much better. Okay, it's not about abolishing all patents, it's just about making more popular the other idea, making this a game changer, making this the default thing to do in everybody's mind, or at least one of the options in everybody's mind. Thank you. Yes, great initiative, and I hope it will survive a long time. But as you saw with the Linux Defender website, there are circumstances you cannot foresee. So, you mentioned blockchain and that it would be overkill. So, what I'm saying is, blockchain might be the only way to put it out there in all eternity, well, as long as some computers are running. And, yeah, my question is, why do you think blockchain is overkill and why it's not the solution? Well, in which blockchain would you put it? If you put it in the Bitcoin, well, if you put it in the Bitcoin blockchain, I think it's not big enough, fast enough, maybe if you are very popular. There's a bit of overkill that gets distributed so much. If we have, okay, you can have a blockchain, a chain of proof, like you calculate the hashers. You just have to digest the blockchain. Yes, indeed, yes. But also it costs a bit, for example, if you do it with Bitcoin. So, okay, it's not excluded the ID, it's a nice ID. This is part of the, well, the research behind it. Do we do blockchain? If we do that, even if we do the cryptographic hashers, we have already the best solutions. The other defense publication the commerce provides, they don't do that. The patent offices, they don't do that. So, indeed, these are some other things, technical issues, that we can improve a lot on. So, I try to do this without too much causing feedback loop. So, am I right? It's technically a defensive publication with an easy to access interface, but from a technical point of view, it's a defense publication. Yes, it's a defensive, legally it's a defensive publication, but we add a lot more openness than with the current solutions. Not just open access, but also open discussion, so that people can discuss, okay, nice ID, but you could add that. We have time for one more question. So, people just who had the questions, because there are a few people who had their hands up before. I have two questions, actually. So, first one is simple. If everything works correctly, if everything is implemented, it works correctly, will those be accepted as prior art? It's first question, and second question, will it be easier to implement things avoiding the multilingual aspect? So, take one language, let's start from one language. I don't see why if this is working well, it will not be accepted by the traditional patent offices. If they find your website, if they find your website, they could accept it, if they trust that the date is not cheated and so more, any publication in theory, they could accept. And with all that trust that we are trying to build, probably going to be accepted, and there exists something like patent treaty, where it's written, which sources at least the patent offices should check, and we hope we can get in that white list. The second question, the multilingual. Okay, that's not for, I guess, the first year. That's a bit of a challenge, but if we are growing and we have maybe ambassadors in every country or in every language, this should be doable. And well, over a few years, machine translation will be improving, and that will probably also help. Thank you.
 Good morning.  I'm Frédéric Bastier.  I'm working at the Free University of Brussels, but not this one, not the French-speaking one,  but the Flemish fork of it.  Main campus being one kilometer from here.  I'm one of the founders of the Open Patent Office.  And of course, people that love freedom of software and openness are not really so happy with the state-granted monopolies.  Patents are state-granted monopolies.  Besides the ethical issues, it's also a big problem practically.  It's very hard to write software or to even develop a web shop without violating any of these 20 patents covering web shops.  Some patents are too stupid to be true.  For example, slide to unlock is actually a software implementation of a centuries-old ID.  It's not only in the patent in the software world that's a problem.  In the medical world, patients are dying.  Like Richard Stallman said, if you lobby for patent enforcement on expensive life-saving drugs in poor countries, you should be charged for genocide.  In the mobile world, everybody's attacked by others with patents.  And if you're a big company, you can probably make a deal with cross-licensing or you can counter-shoot.  Quite new problem is actually the patent rolls.  You can't make a deal with them.  You can't counter-shoot them because they are non-practicing entities.  They produce nothing. They sell nothing.  So you cannot attack them.  Patents are not cheap to obtain.  Maybe you say, okay, I don't like patents or they shouldn't be cheap.  They should be extremely expensive.  But this is a problem for small organizations and individuals.  What about fair competition?  The big costs, okay, there are renewal, well, there are registration costs for patents.  There are renewal costs for patents.  And the big cost is your legal cost for a legal advisor to write the patent such that they are not invalidated by prior art.  So you don't write too broad, but also don't write too narrow because you want to block the competition as much as possible.  Well, probably not you, you, but the organizations that try to get patents.  So also patents are written in a difficult legal language nowadays.  Okay, it seems that with these costs, together with certainly with litigation costs,  actually the average profit of a patent today is less than zero,  except in the chemical pharmaceutical sector.  And that's because a molecule is easy to define exactly.  In other sectors, our stuff is defined more loosely and that raises a lot of more ground for conflicts.  So is a patent a good idea for you?  Take this into account.  So actually patents are a tax on innovation.  Some researchers say that at least a tax, that it is at least a tax of around 12% on innovation.  In the biomedical sector, some researchers say patents are actually slowing down innovation with around 30%.  Also, patents nowadays are too vague to learn from.  Patent lovers will say, yeah, patents are a trade-off between giving a little bit of monopoly during a little bit of time,  20 years, for in return getting the knowledge of the companies to avoid that they keep everything secret.  And they will say patent databases are huge knowledge databases.  Even in my university, patent officers say, don't forget to look for knowledge in the patent databases.  But actually, researchers don't do that because patent databases, did you try to read the patent?  Patents are almost impossible to understand.  So it's time to fix patents.  Since long, according to many.  So let's see what kind of solutions exist and if this is enough.  Thumbs up if you lobby for good patent reform like abolishing software patents.  It's a long struggle.  If you have patents, a good idea is to join a patent pool, a defensive patent pool.  One around Linux is the open invention network.  On the picture you see Depp Nicholson with a very active speaker at FOSDEM.  There is somebody else from the open invention network in the room.  So great idea, there was the previous speaker, another defensive patent pool, a lot network.  Good if you have patents.  What can you do to avoid patents?  You want to avoid that somebody else gets a patent on your ID.  I loved this previous speaker mentioning that there was initiative to kill patents before they are granted in the application phase in the US.  I hope he's right because there used to be the peer to patent initiative and that is a historic initiative of the United States patent office.  So I hope there is still a way to do it during the application phase, but I'm not sure.  A quite new initiative is unpatent.  They want to crowdsource IDs for invalidating bad patents.  So if you think, okay, I don't like that patent, you mentioned them, please attack that patent and then they will do a fundraising.  If they have $20,000, they will start the procedure to invalidate that patent.  If you don't have a patent yet, but you have a great ID and you bring it to market, be careful.  You risk to lose your freedom to operate.  If somebody else gets a patent on your ID because they have the same ID or because they see you simply doing it, they could get a patent and they could block you.  There was a question at the previous presentation after the presentation, what can I do then?  Should I take a patent? Not in this sector, but you could write a defensive publication.  Just describe how your ID works.  You make an enabling publication and you make sure that the patent offices can find it.  So not just on your website because then they will not even trust it that you didn't cheat with the date and so more.  But also don't just put it in your code because patent offices are not reading your source code.  They are also not trying your programs.  So we need something better.  There exist commercial initiatives for that.  Resource disclosure is a journal.  They have around 1,000 publications per year, which is actually nothing compared to the 2 million patents worldwide every year.  And they have publication fees per page.  So most of these defensive publications are very short to pagers.  And they have a paywall for readers.  So no open access.  Another one IP.com, very similar.  10,000 publications per year, so very small compared to the number of patents yearly.  Publications fee and a paywall.  A great initiative was a defensive publications project by Linux defenders.  They collected with your help defensive publications around Linux software.  A little bit broader than Linux only.  And they submitted it to IP.com where you have to pay the publication fees, but they did this for free with sponsoring.  So no paywall also to read because they republished it.  The problem is they only got 156 publications since 2009 and the last one was in January 2015.  I mailed them, okay, I love your initiative, but what happened?  We want to do something similar.  The email came back bouncing.  So if there's somebody who knows about this project and the status, please tell me.  So none of the current defensive publication solutions have the popularity, the impact, or the openness that the concept deserves.  If I talk with, well, actually if you talk with whatever people, for example, in the street and you ask what is a patent,  everybody has a quite good idea.  They know there's kind of a proof that you invented something.  But ask people about defensive publications, even researchers, they don't know.  They don't know the concept.  They don't know the term.  So we need something better.  Our proposal is the open patent office, which is a non-profit organization.  So we don't ask money for publishing or for reading.  And our aim is to stimulate open innovation and to strengthen the public domain.  And we do this by combining the best practices of the defensive publications and the patent offices.  Patent offices, their strong practices, all that registration, the bookkeeping of at what date was what registered.  And open discussions.  None of the previous projects added that.  With each ID, we add the possibility to discuss these IDs.  Because if IDs talk, they become smarter.  If IDs have sex, new IDs are being born.  So we want to stimulate this.  So our motto is, protect your freedom to operate by sharing your IDs.  You don't get the full protection of patents, including the aggressive possibilities to block others.  But at least you have that defensive protection.  Others will not be able to get patents on your ID anymore.  So we want to help you with an easy publication process.  On the website, you will have a guided web form where you simply mention the title, some information about yourself,  or if you desire to stay anonymously, that is possible.  Not with patents, but with open patents.  Yes, you give an abstract summary, background, problem statement.  You mentioned prior art, very important.  Patents should also do that, but are sometimes trying to avoid to give the crucial prior art.  Given enabling description, that's the most important part.  You need to give a full description so that somebody else can implement your ID.  Add figures if relevant.  If you push the publication button, you get immediate publication.  Of course, it's very important that the patent offices will trust us.  So we will guarantee the authenticity and the date by a date stamp.  And then we can do much better than others by, for example, giving cryptographic hashes of the open patents,  cryptographic signatures, block chain is probably overkill,  and we can let others do mirroring of our database.  We need to make it easy for the patent offices, the traditional patent offices,  to find your defensive publications.  So we will give them surgeon, giant, tax, and API to integrate their software.  But we will also follow the international patent classification.  Not easy, even me, the first time when I tried to search for software patents in the national patent classifications,  I didn't find them immediately, they are hidden under business methods.  We give RSS feeds so that innovators that want to follow something about their own sector can easily do that,  and we facilitate, of course, citations.  We want to improve the quality because, of course, spammers will also like our platform.  So we will stress the importance of having a good enabling description.  We will do quality control post publication, and this will probably still need some research  on how to do this in the best way.  And we will give quality metrics, an open patent that will get more citations,  of course, with probably a better open patent than another one.  You hear me mentioning open patents, and an open patent is actually not a patent,  it's like new is not unique.  But the idea is what I said, everybody knows about patents, nobody knows about defense publications,  so I think we will be more popular with this little hack.  We give it just a more sexy name.  And it's all for stimulating open innovation, so we want, of course, open access.  We will put a Creative Commons license on the text so that text can be reused, forked,  but also that our database can be mirrored by others.  The IDs by publishing them with us are in the public domain,  so there is no thing like a patent license on these IDs, the IDs are in the public domain.  And then we facilitate comments on these IDs, discussions,  maybe we enable requests for prior arts and enable requests for solutions for certain problems,  but that's not the core business, maybe we can link to initiatives like ask patents and stack it change.  Okay.  And then we want to empower innovators.  Patent holders are very proud of their patents,  they're writing their resumes and their CVs, and we want to give something similar.  They get a US patent number, a European patent number,  with us they will get an open patent number that they can cite everywhere.  And we will give rankings like the most active open patent holder.  So, actually, open patents are defensive publications,  but probably people will mostly like to know how do open patents compare with patents.  So, first of all, patents are expensive to obtain,  registration and renewable fees, no fees for open patents.  Writing a patent is difficult because you need to avoid existing prior art.  Writing open patents is very easy because actually this trying to establish prior art  is not invalidated by prior art.  So, if you forgot something, some prior art, it's not a problem.  Patents are often very hard to understand, written in vague legalese.  We hope that the open patents will be much easier to understand  because you don't have that strategic game of blocking the competition.  Right, well, obtaining a patent is a slow process.  It can often take a year before you get your patent finally granted.  Here you will get immediate publication when you push the publication button.  Patents, their protection is territorial.  It means you need to ask a patent in every country where you want to have protection.  An open patent is, of course, immediately international.  If you publish your ID and it can be found everywhere, it will be accepted everywhere as prior art.  Of course, patents give you both defensive and offensive protection  and open patents only give you defensive protection.  So, status, we are in pre-launch phase only.  We have a pre-launch website.  We are preparing to build for now a prototype website  where you can at least file your IDs but not with all the features  of the cryptographic hashers and so more in the beginning.  Because, of course, this will need funding.  We are a non-profit organization. We don't ask publication fees.  We will ask donations.  If you can help, is it financially or with developing or whatever,  if you are an enthusiast, please contact us.  Challenges will be besides funding acceptance.  Acceptance by innovators.  Please help us if you have innovative IDs.  Start writing them out.  And acceptance by the software, by the traditional patent officers, of course.  We need to avoid spam and I'm also a bit worried about all the bullshit  and pseudo-scientific submissions that we will get.  But the patent officers are also getting them  and they are also publishing too often pseudo-scientific patents.  If things get multilingual, which they should be,  this problem is even going to be harder.  How to detect Chinese bullshit.  But the patent officers also have that problem.  If an ID is published somewhere in Chinese,  will an English-speaking patent office always find this?  I don't think so.  And then writing in the open patents is easy,  but putting good metadata on it,  especially adding international patent classification,  metadata on it is not so easy to do with crowdsourcing.  So we're still finding solutions,  searching solutions for that.  So I'm curious for your questions, your comments,  maybe support.  You can find us there on your favorite platform,  at least the most popular platforms are there.  Hello.  First to disclaimer, I'm Mokobima,  I work with the Open Invention Network.  So I'm the guy that said yes, these talks are exactly what we need.  One comment up front, I would like us to be aware  that we're living in a filter bubble.  We are in some form a minority,  but we probably all here agree that patents on software are a difficult issue.  If you leave FOSTA and you talk to other people in Brussels,  you'll get blank stares.  I spoke at a conference at the Joint Research Center  for the European Commission in March  on the dangers of patents on software.  In the room of 300 people, I was the only one speaking from this angle.  Which means we need to get engaged also with lobbying and with spreading the word.  For example, the Economist articles that you quoted do not really support what you're saying.  The question comes at the end.  They're not called for abolishing the patent system,  and there's no consensus that the patent system itself is bad.  I think the terminology is important.  As you said, defensive publications.  The issue with Linux defenders is still there.  Nobody's writing defensive publications.  This is my question.  You said you want to make it more interesting by giving it a better name.  Have you got responses from the open source community?  We are interested in submitting and writing,  because that was our main problem.  I spent ages agitating for that,  and we never got the responses from that.  Good remark.  I'm not going to be filter bubble, but on the other hand,  I talked a lot with researchers in my universities from different fields,  and actually, they are none of, well,  I didn't encounter researchers that are fans of patents.  Their job is sharing knowledge.  So they don't like the restrictions of patents.  Of course, what they like is the big money that could come from them,  because they are quite realistic.  The patent officers in the universities are more optimistic  about the possibilities of the patents,  and always remind us, don't forget the possibilities of patenting.  So, yeah, researchers like this idea,  and I have researchers that say,  I'm going to start writing patents.  For example, the people from mathematics,  mathematics is not patentable,  and they feel like, why not?  And they love this idea, like, okay,  I can write out my ideas at least at the open patent office,  because we will not restrict anything,  because it doesn't harm if you write a defensive publication.  So, yeah, I'm optimistic also,  because, for example, I talked to some patent attorneys,  and they say, okay, only now I get it after your talk about open patent office  that actually, we patent attorneys very often have to tell our clients  like, okay, for this idea,  going for a patent is not the best strategy,  and then they do nothing.  And then the patent attorneys now think,  okay, I should mention more this defensive publication possibility.  So, I think, yes, we have 2 million patents worldwide every year.  We have around less than a percent defensive publications compared to that.  I think we can do much, much better.  Okay, it's not about abolishing all patents,  it's just about making more popular the other idea,  making this a game changer,  making this the default thing to do in everybody's mind,  or at least one of the options in everybody's mind.  Thank you.  Yes, great initiative, and I hope it will survive a long time.  But as you saw with the Linux Defender website,  there are circumstances you cannot foresee.  So, you mentioned blockchain and that it would be overkill.  So, what I'm saying is, blockchain might be the only way to put it out there in all eternity,  well, as long as some computers are running.  And, yeah, my question is, why do you think blockchain is overkill  and why it's not the solution?  Well, in which blockchain would you put it?  If you put it in the Bitcoin, well, if you put it in the Bitcoin blockchain,  I think it's not big enough, fast enough, maybe if you are very popular.  There's a bit of overkill that gets distributed so much.  If we have, okay, you can have a blockchain, a chain of proof,  like you calculate the hashers.  You just have to digest the blockchain.  Yes, indeed, yes.  But also it costs a bit, for example, if you do it with Bitcoin.  So, okay, it's not excluded the ID, it's a nice ID.  This is part of the, well, the research behind it.  Do we do blockchain?  If we do that, even if we do the cryptographic hashers,  we have already the best solutions.  The other defense publication the commerce provides, they don't do that.  The patent offices, they don't do that.  So, indeed, these are some other things, technical issues,  that we can improve a lot on.  So, I try to do this without too much causing feedback loop.  So, am I right?  It's technically a defensive publication with an easy to access interface,  but from a technical point of view, it's a defense publication.  Yes, it's a defensive, legally it's a defensive publication,  but we add a lot more openness than with the current solutions.  Not just open access, but also open discussion,  so that people can discuss, okay, nice ID, but you could add that.  We have time for one more question.  So, people just who had the questions,  because there are a few people who had their hands up before.  I have two questions, actually.  So, first one is simple.  If everything works correctly, if everything is implemented,  it works correctly, will those be accepted as prior art?  It's first question, and second question,  will it be easier to implement things avoiding the multilingual aspect?  So, take one language, let's start from one language.  I don't see why if this is working well,  it will not be accepted by the traditional patent offices.  If they find your website, if they find your website,  they could accept it, if they trust that the date is not cheated and so more,  any publication in theory, they could accept.  And with all that trust that we are trying to build,  probably going to be accepted,  and there exists something like patent treaty,  where it's written, which sources at least the patent offices should check,  and we hope we can get in that white list.  The second question, the multilingual.  Okay, that's not for, I guess, the first year.  That's a bit of a challenge, but if we are growing  and we have maybe ambassadors in every country or in every language,  this should be doable.  And well, over a few years, machine translation will be improving,  and that will probably also help.  Thank you.
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Good morning. I'm Frédéric Bastier. I'm working at the Free University of Brussels, but not this one, not the French-speaking one, but the Flemish fork of it. Main campus being one kilometer from here. I'm one of the founders of the Open Patent Office. And of course, people that love freedom of software and openness are not really so happy with the state-granted monopolies. Patents are state-granted monopolies. Besides the ethical issues, it's also a big problem practically. It's very hard to write software or to even develop a web shop without violating any of these 20 patents covering web shops. Some patents are too stupid to be true. For example, slide to unlock is actually a software implementation of a centuries-old ID. It's not only in the patent in the software world that's a problem. In the medical world, patients are dying. Like Richard Stallman said, if you lobby for patent enforcement on expensive life-saving drugs in poor countries, you should be charged for genocide. In the mobile world, everybody's attacked by others with patents. And if you're a big company, you can probably make a deal with cross-licensing or you can counter-shoot. Quite new problem is actually the patent rolls. You can't make a deal with them. You can't counter-shoot them because they are non-practicing entities. They produce nothing. They sell nothing. So you cannot attack them. Patents are not cheap to obtain. Maybe you say, okay, I don't like patents or they shouldn't be cheap. They should be extremely expensive. But this is a problem for small organizations and individuals. What about fair competition? The big costs, okay, there are renewal, well, there are registration costs for patents. There are renewal costs for patents. And the big cost is your legal cost for a legal advisor to write the patent such that they are not invalidated by prior art. So you don't write too broad, but also don't write too narrow because you want to block the competition as much as possible. Well, probably not you, you, but the organizations that try to get patents. So also patents are written in a difficult legal language nowadays. Okay, it seems that with these costs, together with certainly with litigation costs, actually the average profit of a patent today is less than zero, except in the chemical pharmaceutical sector. And that's because a molecule is easy to define exactly. In other sectors, our stuff is defined more loosely and that raises a lot of more ground for conflicts. So is a patent a good idea for you? Take this into account. So actually patents are a tax on innovation. Some researchers say that at least a tax, that it is at least a tax of around 12% on innovation. In the biomedical sector, some researchers say patents are actually slowing down innovation with around 30%. Also, patents nowadays are too vague to learn from. Patent lovers will say, yeah, patents are a trade-off between giving a little bit of monopoly during a little bit of time, 20 years, for in return getting the knowledge of the companies to avoid that they keep everything secret. And they will say patent databases are huge knowledge databases. Even in my university, patent officers say, don't forget to look for knowledge in the patent databases. But actually, researchers don't do that because patent databases, did you try to read the patent? Patents are almost impossible to understand. So it's time to fix patents. Since long, according to many. So let's see what kind of solutions exist and if this is enough. Thumbs up if you lobby for good patent reform like abolishing software patents. It's a long struggle. If you have patents, a good idea is to join a patent pool, a defensive patent pool. One around Linux is the open invention network. On the picture you see Depp Nicholson with a very active speaker at FOSDEM. There is somebody else from the open invention network in the room. So great idea, there was the previous speaker, another defensive patent pool, a lot network. Good if you have patents. What can you do to avoid patents? You want to avoid that somebody else gets a patent on your ID. I loved this previous speaker mentioning that there was initiative to kill patents before they are granted in the application phase in the US. I hope he's right because there used to be the peer to patent initiative and that is a historic initiative of the United States patent office. So I hope there is still a way to do it during the application phase, but I'm not sure. A quite new initiative is unpatent. They want to crowdsource IDs for invalidating bad patents. So if you think, okay, I don't like that patent, you mentioned them, please attack that patent and then they will do a fundraising. If they have $20,000, they will start the procedure to invalidate that patent. If you don't have a patent yet, but you have a great ID and you bring it to market, be careful. You risk to lose your freedom to operate. If somebody else gets a patent on your ID because they have the same ID or because they see you simply doing it, they could get a patent and they could block you. There was a question at the previous presentation after the presentation, what can I do then? Should I take a patent? Not in this sector, but you could write a defensive publication. Just describe how your ID works. You make an enabling publication and you make sure that the patent offices can find it. So not just on your website because then they will not even trust it that you didn't cheat with the date and so more. But also don't just put it in your code because patent offices are not reading your source code. They are also not trying your programs. So we need something better. There exist commercial initiatives for that. Resource disclosure is a journal. They have around 1,000 publications per year, which is actually nothing compared to the 2 million patents worldwide every year. And they have publication fees per page. So most of these defensive publications are very short to pagers. And they have a paywall for readers. So no open access. Another one IP.com, very similar. 10,000 publications per year, so very small compared to the number of patents yearly. Publications fee and a paywall. A great initiative was a defensive publications project by Linux defenders. They collected with your help defensive publications around Linux software. A little bit broader than Linux only. And they submitted it to IP.com where you have to pay the publication fees, but they did this for free with sponsoring. So no paywall also to read because they republished it. The problem is they only got 156 publications since 2009 and the last one was in January 2015. I mailed them, okay, I love your initiative, but what happened? We want to do something similar. The email came back bouncing. So if there's somebody who knows about this project and the status, please tell me. So none of the current defensive publication solutions have the popularity, the impact, or the openness that the concept deserves. If I talk with, well, actually if you talk with whatever people, for example, in the street and you ask what is a patent, everybody has a quite good idea. They know there's kind of a proof that you invented something. But ask people about defensive publications, even researchers, they don't know. They don't know the concept. They don't know the term. So we need something better. Our proposal is the open patent office, which is a non-profit organization. So we don't ask money for publishing or for reading. And our aim is to stimulate open innovation and to strengthen the public domain. And we do this by combining the best practices of the defensive publications and the patent offices. Patent offices, their strong practices, all that registration, the bookkeeping of at what date was what registered. And open discussions. None of the previous projects added that. With each ID, we add the possibility to discuss these IDs. Because if IDs talk, they become smarter. If IDs have sex, new IDs are being born. So we want to stimulate this. So our motto is, protect your freedom to operate by sharing your IDs. You don't get the full protection of patents, including the aggressive possibilities to block others. But at least you have that defensive protection. Others will not be able to get patents on your ID anymore. So we want to help you with an easy publication process. On the website, you will have a guided web form where you simply mention the title, some information about yourself, or if you desire to stay anonymously, that is possible. Not with patents, but with open patents. Yes, you give an abstract summary, background, problem statement. You mentioned prior art, very important. Patents should also do that, but are sometimes trying to avoid to give the crucial prior art. Given enabling description, that's the most important part. You need to give a full description so that somebody else can implement your ID. Add figures if relevant. If you push the publication button, you get immediate publication. Of course, it's very important that the patent offices will trust us. So we will guarantee the authenticity and the date by a date stamp. And then we can do much better than others by, for example, giving cryptographic hashes of the open patents, cryptographic signatures, block chain is probably overkill, and we can let others do mirroring of our database. We need to make it easy for the patent offices, the traditional patent offices, to find your defensive publications. So we will give them surgeon, giant, tax, and API to integrate their software. But we will also follow the international patent classification. Not easy, even me, the first time when I tried to search for software patents in the national patent classifications, I didn't find them immediately, they are hidden under business methods. We give RSS feeds so that innovators that want to follow something about their own sector can easily do that, and we facilitate, of course, citations. We want to improve the quality because, of course, spammers will also like our platform. So we will stress the importance of having a good enabling description. We will do quality control post publication, and this will probably still need some research on how to do this in the best way. And we will give quality metrics, an open patent that will get more citations, of course, with probably a better open patent than another one. You hear me mentioning open patents, and an open patent is actually not a patent, it's like new is not unique. But the idea is what I said, everybody knows about patents, nobody knows about defense publications, so I think we will be more popular with this little hack. We give it just a more sexy name. And it's all for stimulating open innovation, so we want, of course, open access. We will put a Creative Commons license on the text so that text can be reused, forked, but also that our database can be mirrored by others. The IDs by publishing them with us are in the public domain, so there is no thing like a patent license on these IDs, the IDs are in the public domain. And then we facilitate comments on these IDs, discussions, maybe we enable requests for prior arts and enable requests for solutions for certain problems, but that's not the core business, maybe we can link to initiatives like ask patents and stack it change. Okay. And then we want to empower innovators. Patent holders are very proud of their patents, they're writing their resumes and their CVs, and we want to give something similar. They get a US patent number, a European patent number, with us they will get an open patent number that they can cite everywhere. And we will give rankings like the most active open patent holder. So, actually, open patents are defensive publications, but probably people will mostly like to know how do open patents compare with patents. So, first of all, patents are expensive to obtain, registration and renewable fees, no fees for open patents. Writing a patent is difficult because you need to avoid existing prior art. Writing open patents is very easy because actually this trying to establish prior art is not invalidated by prior art. So, if you forgot something, some prior art, it's not a problem. Patents are often very hard to understand, written in vague legalese. We hope that the open patents will be much easier to understand because you don't have that strategic game of blocking the competition. Right, well, obtaining a patent is a slow process. It can often take a year before you get your patent finally granted. Here you will get immediate publication when you push the publication button. Patents, their protection is territorial. It means you need to ask a patent in every country where you want to have protection. An open patent is, of course, immediately international. If you publish your ID and it can be found everywhere, it will be accepted everywhere as prior art. Of course, patents give you both defensive and offensive protection and open patents only give you defensive protection. So, status, we are in pre-launch phase only. We have a pre-launch website. We are preparing to build for now a prototype website where you can at least file your IDs but not with all the features of the cryptographic hashers and so more in the beginning. Because, of course, this will need funding. We are a non-profit organization. We don't ask publication fees. We will ask donations. If you can help, is it financially or with developing or whatever, if you are an enthusiast, please contact us. Challenges will be besides funding acceptance. Acceptance by innovators. Please help us if you have innovative IDs. Start writing them out. And acceptance by the software, by the traditional patent officers, of course. We need to avoid spam and I'm also a bit worried about all the bullshit and pseudo-scientific submissions that we will get. But the patent officers are also getting them and they are also publishing too often pseudo-scientific patents. If things get multilingual, which they should be, this problem is even going to be harder. How to detect Chinese bullshit. But the patent officers also have that problem. If an ID is published somewhere in Chinese, will an English-speaking patent office always find this? I don't think so. And then writing in the open patents is easy, but putting good metadata on it, especially adding international patent classification, metadata on it is not so easy to do with crowdsourcing. So we're still finding solutions, searching solutions for that. So I'm curious for your questions, your comments, maybe support. You can find us there on your favorite platform, at least the most popular platforms are there. Hello. First to disclaimer, I'm Mokobima, I work with the Open Invention Network. So I'm the guy that said yes, these talks are exactly what we need. One comment up front, I would like us to be aware that we're living in a filter bubble. We are in some form a minority, but we probably all here agree that patents on software are a difficult issue. If you leave FOSTA and you talk to other people in Brussels, you'll get blank stares. I spoke at a conference at the Joint Research Center for the European Commission in March on the dangers of patents on software. In the room of 300 people, I was the only one speaking from this angle. Which means we need to get engaged also with lobbying and with spreading the word. For example, the Economist articles that you quoted do not really support what you're saying. The question comes at the end. They're not called for abolishing the patent system, and there's no consensus that the patent system itself is bad. I think the terminology is important. As you said, defensive publications. The issue with Linux defenders is still there. Nobody's writing defensive publications. This is my question. You said you want to make it more interesting by giving it a better name. Have you got responses from the open source community? We are interested in submitting and writing, because that was our main problem. I spent ages agitating for that, and we never got the responses from that. Good remark. I'm not going to be filter bubble, but on the other hand, I talked a lot with researchers in my universities from different fields, and actually, they are none of, well, I didn't encounter researchers that are fans of patents. Their job is sharing knowledge. So they don't like the restrictions of patents. Of course, what they like is the big money that could come from them, because they are quite realistic. The patent officers in the universities are more optimistic about the possibilities of the patents, and always remind us, don't forget the possibilities of patenting. So, yeah, researchers like this idea, and I have researchers that say, I'm going to start writing patents. For example, the people from mathematics, mathematics is not patentable, and they feel like, why not? And they love this idea, like, okay, I can write out my ideas at least at the open patent office, because we will not restrict anything, because it doesn't harm if you write a defensive publication. So, yeah, I'm optimistic also, because, for example, I talked to some patent attorneys, and they say, okay, only now I get it after your talk about open patent office that actually, we patent attorneys very often have to tell our clients like, okay, for this idea, going for a patent is not the best strategy, and then they do nothing. And then the patent attorneys now think, okay, I should mention more this defensive publication possibility. So, I think, yes, we have 2 million patents worldwide every year. We have around less than a percent defensive publications compared to that. I think we can do much, much better. Okay, it's not about abolishing all patents, it's just about making more popular the other idea, making this a game changer, making this the default thing to do in everybody's mind, or at least one of the options in everybody's mind. Thank you. Yes, great initiative, and I hope it will survive a long time. But as you saw with the Linux Defender website, there are circumstances you cannot foresee. So, you mentioned blockchain and that it would be overkill. So, what I'm saying is, blockchain might be the only way to put it out there in all eternity, well, as long as some computers are running. And, yeah, my question is, why do you think blockchain is overkill and why it's not the solution? Well, in which blockchain would you put it? If you put it in the Bitcoin, well, if you put it in the Bitcoin blockchain, I think it's not big enough, fast enough, maybe if you are very popular. There's a bit of overkill that gets distributed so much. If we have, okay, you can have a blockchain, a chain of proof, like you calculate the hashers. You just have to digest the blockchain. Yes, indeed, yes. But also it costs a bit, for example, if you do it with Bitcoin. So, okay, it's not excluded the ID, it's a nice ID. This is part of the, well, the research behind it. Do we do blockchain? If we do that, even if we do the cryptographic hashers, we have already the best solutions. The other defense publication the commerce provides, they don't do that. The patent offices, they don't do that. So, indeed, these are some other things, technical issues, that we can improve a lot on. So, I try to do this without too much causing feedback loop. So, am I right? It's technically a defensive publication with an easy to access interface, but from a technical point of view, it's a defense publication. Yes, it's a defensive, legally it's a defensive publication, but we add a lot more openness than with the current solutions. Not just open access, but also open discussion, so that people can discuss, okay, nice ID, but you could add that. We have time for one more question. So, people just who had the questions, because there are a few people who had their hands up before. I have two questions, actually. So, first one is simple. If everything works correctly, if everything is implemented, it works correctly, will those be accepted as prior art? It's first question, and second question, will it be easier to implement things avoiding the multilingual aspect? So, take one language, let's start from one language. I don't see why if this is working well, it will not be accepted by the traditional patent offices. If they find your website, if they find your website, they could accept it, if they trust that the date is not cheated and so more, any publication in theory, they could accept. And with all that trust that we are trying to build, probably going to be accepted, and there exists something like patent treaty, where it's written, which sources at least the patent offices should check, and we hope we can get in that white list. The second question, the multilingual. Okay, that's not for, I guess, the first year. That's a bit of a challenge, but if we are growing and we have maybe ambassadors in every country or in every language, this should be doable. And well, over a few years, machine translation will be improving, and that will probably also help. Thank you.
of software and openness are not really so happy for conflicts. So is a patent a good idea for Patent lovers will say, yeah, patents are a return getting the knowledge of the companies to understand. So it's time to fix patents. Since from the open invention network in the room. So another defensive patent pool, a lot network. else gets a patent on your ID. I loved this I hope there is still a way to do it during the could get a patent and they could block you. don't just put it in your code because patent have publication fees per page. So most of these And they have a paywall for readers. So no open you have to pay the publication fees, but they popularity, the impact, or the openness that the concept deserves. If I talk with, well, actually stimulate open innovation and to strengthen the public domain. And we do this by combining the motto is, protect your freedom to operate by possibilities to block others. But at least you patent offices, the traditional patent offices, to find your defensive publications. So we will patent number, with us they will get an open is difficult because you need to avoid existing problem. Patents are often very hard to Patents, their protection is territorial. It offensive protection and open patents only give But the patent officers are also getting them and we're still finding solutions, searching defensive publications. The issue with Linux the people from mathematics, mathematics is not ideas at least at the open patent office, because defensive publication with an easy to access which sources at least the patent offices should