 Hi, I'm really thrilled to be a part of this discussion. I've been Looking forward to this meeting for a long time actually in the discussions that will take place today My name is Elliott Harman. I'm an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation My colleague Daniel Naser is an attorney with EFF and you'll be hearing from him later this afternoon We are here kind of representing a campaign that we launched several months ago called reclaim invention and to put this Maybe a little bit of perspective of our strategy as an organization We kind of see this as the Latest front in really a lot of work that we've been doing over a lot of years having to do with the patent system And what we see as flaws in the system and the way in which the system is kind of works in practice that put Innovative practicing companies at a disadvantage particularly in high-tech areas that are particularly fertile for innovation And puts aggressive patent assertion entities at an unfair advantage And the issue of how that plays out in universities and tech transfer is something that we've done a little bit of thinking in writing about over the years But about a year ago, we decided that it was time to start investing a little more energy in it So I'm not going to talk about this too much because you are then already kind of walked through this This is the the universities with the most patents in the intellectual ventures portfolio and even just looking at this I'm reminded again of the issue of representation of the public universities and I'm glad that there are some perspectives of people who have worked in the public universities fear here Also another point I was going to make about this and somebody can correct me later if I'm mistaken about this But my understanding is that this is of the 30,000 Patents that IV publicly lists on its portfolio So there are a number that are under exclusive licenses that have not been disclosed that are not part of these numbers But even within those 30,000 that are in its public portfolio 500 of those originating from universities is a striking number And this is a slightly different set of data Because this is patents from universities in the US period as opposed to specifically NIH funded ones, but you get the same idea Looking at this graph it would be very easy to tell even if you knew nothing about this space Win the by dole act past and so we'll we'll talk about that more in a couple of minutes But this graph is very interesting to me for another reason and this is kind of bringing in some of my background in the open access world When you look at this graph, it's so interesting to think about it in the context of other Developments that have happened in science over the same period of time and the kind of explosion of open access Research and now we're at this point where essentially all Federal government funded science in the United States is is under an open access policy requiring it to be made available to the public after an embargo period and Many many foundations are moving in that direction adopting open access policies as well Many of which are more aggressive than the government policies and so it struck me as this odd paradox that over The last 10-15 years We've moved more and more toward this federally funded research being available to the public to read to build on to Incorporate into their businesses But at the very same time universities are patenting more aggressively than ever on that same body of research And at least some of those patents are ending up in the hands of companies that don't necessarily have the public's best interests at heart It almost seemed to me like this kind of massive game of whack-a-mole We're playing in which we've just managed to push back this one sort of threat to another interest And it sort of popped back in our faces in a different form So again, that's why we decided to launch this campaign reclaim invention and the kind of the official launch of this was about eight months ago but it was really the culmination of conversations that we've been having over a long time and are continuing to have It essentially consists of two components One is that we are calling on Every research university in the US to adopt a policy that says that it will not knowingly sell or license its patents to PAEs and then it goes on to say that when evaluating Whether whether to partner with a certain company it will look at the history of that company and take a good-faith effort to see whether it has a History of litigation that looks like patent trolling We created a petition so that people could petition their universities to sign this pledge This was kind of a new thing for us. We'd never done something quite like this before And now you can see the I think it's about five thousand now people that have signed this petition And it's kind of interesting you can split it up by institution So you can go to reclaim invention org Slash Harvard and and and see how many people with Harvard University have called on Harvard to adopt this pledge The other half of the campaign is this piece of model state legislation that we wrote which is called the reclaim invention act this does Some of the same things and some slightly different things but specifically focused on state university systems within a state So what this model text that we wrote does is one it requires state-funded universities to adopt a policy not to sell our license to PAEs and to avoids the sale of any state university patent to a PAE This was an interesting exercise for us to put this together Because it was the first time that we had to kind of find a legal definition of PAE that we were comfortable with And we looked at how some other organizations had dealt with this issue and how some existing legislation had dealt with it To arrive at a definition that we were more or less happy with So according to this definition of PAE is an entity whose primary business model is based on patent assertion Or otherwise using patents to obtain licensing fees from practicing companies, which I think is a pretty good working definition This is actually a more conservative definition than then then some of the more kind of informal definitions of PAEs or trolls And I think it works well in this context and that it makes it clear that it's not talking about a Practicing company that is also asserting its its patents so long as the underlying business model is Actually about using the invention and it is not about litigation So we launched this campaign about eight months ago and a couple of interesting things have happened since then One is that there's been a lot of attention to this particularly around like law school students in our network There's a group of students at the University of Texas that are pushing on this issue very hard and trying to get UT to adopt a policy We've also gotten a Handful of state legislators reaching out to us and kind of wanting to talk with us more about our model state legislation It has been introduced thus far in one state that we know of and that's Maryland But we certainly hope to see we hope to see states addressing this issue In an ongoing way Use it using our language if it seems to be appropriate for their context We've also succeeded at annoying some people This is a Relatively representative example of the kind of pushback that we got This is an op-ed that Richard Epstein wrote for Forbes And I kind of I kind of love this line despite myself that it's foolish for universities to sacrifice patent revenues In order to satisfy the aesthetic whims of the EFF I think that that's that's a very funny way of thinking and like I said This is representative of some of the other pushback we received as well because it seems to kind of elevate Revenue above Indeed the reasons why tech transfer offices exist that if there is a license that is not compatible with the mission of the Organization then that's not sacrificing revenue. That's simply carrying out the mission of the organization Daniel made the point that you could kind of apply the same logic to financial aid programs Which are also sacrificing revenue in order to fulfill the aesthetic whims of people who think that access to education is important I'm so glad to have gotten to speak after the two people who spoke earlier because they gave such You know eloquent descriptions of what the purposes of these programs are So I know that this simplistic definition is something that a lot of people in this room would take issue with We also of course whenever we talk about Limitations either voluntary or or statutory on University licenses of course this always brings up the specter of the bydol act and a number of people have talked to us about the Bydol act and this is kind of maybe the thought that I will sort of end with for now is that I think it's very very dangerous to think of bydol as a trump card that kind of shouts shuts down these discussions and in fact it's To do so is to miss both the purpose and I think the language of the law itself The law says it is the policy and objective of Congress to use the patent system to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research or development And that's a purpose that I strongly question whether it's ever compatible with the idea of Licensing to PA is and it even goes on even more specifically in the law to give Preference to small businesses having equal or greater likelihood as other applicants to bring the invention to practical application within a reasonable time Which again if you're looking at a company whose business model does not in any way involve Bringing an invention to practical application. I question whether this can ever actually be achieved by licensing to a PAE And I'm like I said I'm looking forward to the rest of the discussions My slides are there. They are on Google Docs if you're not comfortable using Google Docs email you and I will send you a PDF Thank you very much