 Hello everyone and welcome. I'm Joanna Lee vice president of strategic programs and legal at the Linux foundation and my pronouns are she and her. Part of my job at the Linux foundation is support to support policy and legal initiatives that enhance the continued growth health and evolution of open source ecosystems. I've been an attorney for 17 years in the technology industry, and I've devoted most of my career to supporting open innovation. My co presenters and I are here today to inform you about a threat to open source software innovation and explain what you can do to help, which is only going to require a few minutes of your time. The US patent and trademark offices issue proposed rule changes that would undermine our ability to protect and defend open source software from baseless litigation and attacks from non practicing entities also known as patent trolls. Before my co presenters provide some more information about this threat and what you can do to help. Let me provide some context and background. Open source software relies on one of the most impactful legal inventions the last 50 years, which is the open source license. Open source licensing enables collaborative innovation across companies geographies cultures and industries, resulting in true democratization of innovation. Under these licenses companies and individuals who collaboratively develop open source, agree to license their copyrights and patents and other intellectual property rights to each other and to adopters and end users of open source. In addition to open source licensing there's a set of cultural and behavioral norms and open source communities. The owners of the open source community don't sue each other or sue and users or adopters for using or developing open source software so long as it's done in a compliant manner. Over there are entities outside of our community who have not agreed to those licensing terms and have not agreed to those behavioral norms in a particular concern or non practicing entities also known as NPEs or patent trolls. They don't contribute to innovation in our society. They don't develop technology and they don't provide any products or services. Their entire purpose and business model consists of purchasing patents, threatening infringement lawsuits and extracting settlement payments. Patent trolls often acquire patent center of ambiguous and overly broad scope and questionable validity. Often these are patents that really should never have been granted in the first place, and they file suit against multiple defendants in an attempt to extract settlement payments and royalties. Trolls take advantage of the fact that US patent litigation is very expensive, and many defendants are willing to settle and pay to make the cases go away. Non practicing entities or patent trolls are targeting open source and continue to do so. For example in 2019 a patent troll sued GNOME Foundation alleging that their shot well open source image organizer infringed one of the trolls patents. In other cases trolls target adopters and end users of open source software programs. The Linux Foundation as a steward for open source ecosystems has partnered over the years with organizations such as an open invention network and unified patents and EFF to protect open source software from intellectual property infringement litigation and other risks. The Linux Foundation is a sponsor of unified patents open source zone. For many years, we and our partners have had a system for deterring patent trolls and preventing baseless litigation against developers and adopters of open source software. And the efforts we've engaged in to deter patent trolls has very much been in the background, we generally don't publicize our efforts or victories when we invalidate a low quality patent, or otherwise deter a threat. Why because we don't want to track more attention from patent trolls. However, the efforts that we've been engaged in the background have been very important to to fostering innovation in open source and minimizing the legal risk to continued innovation. The USPTO has recently announced proposed proposed rule changes that would greatly undermine our ability to protect and defend open source software from patent trolls and we need your help. At the end of this webinar, we will give some instructions for how you can submit comments to the USPTO. The volume of comments they receive is very important as is a diversity of voices. The USPTO needs to hear from individuals, developers, hobbyists, large companies, small companies, startups and nonprofits. And to make it easy for you we've prepared some templates that you can modify and copy and paste. And I'll put some links and chats to where the instructions can be found. And I'll go over those instructions with you at the end of this webinar. And also, we'll be using a number of acronyms and terms that as non lawyers, as many of you are non lawyers may not be familiar with so I'll be posting some of the terms in chat. If any terminology comes up during the webinar that you don't understand. Feel free to comment in the question and answer a feature of zoom and I will do my best to moderate and respond as we continue. Thank you for joining us and I'm going to turn it over to Joe. Thank you everyone for being here and thanks Joanna for kicking us off. We are here because there's a process called the inner part is review process which we call IPR that's really under threat. And from EFF's point of view, the reason we're here is because we've learned in the past several years. This process is really one of the best ways to hold patent rolls accountable to hold accountable shell companies that are abusing the system to threaten everyday people, small businesses, individuals, even hobbyists who are expressing themselves online. Let's take a minute and just talk about who I am what I do and why EFF is involved in patents at all. I'm a senior policy analyst at EFF. My actual full title is I'm the Mark Cuban chair to eliminate stupid patents. If you're going to ask me if we've eliminated all the stupid patents we're working on it. We write about one every month in our stupid pattern of the month series. But EFF was involved in fighting bad patents way before we got this. How did we get here. EFF is a civil liberties organization. We were founded in 1990 to make sure that people's constitutional rights would become real in the online world. Additional civil liberties organizations like the ACLU now over 100 years old. They had kind of a blind spot when it came to digital and computer technology. EFF's first case was actually a case where the Secret Service seized computer servers at Steve Jackson games, because they had very wild ideas that the folks making a role playing with some bad people. This was completely bogus and this is one of the reasons the EFF got created. What we realized in the mid 1990s was overreaching government wasn't the only threat to people trying to express themselves online. We started to hear more and more about patents, people being threatened over patents on the most basic of expressive technologies. I'm going to put a link in the chat channel right now that is not really, it's an old link and you're going to be able to tell because I got it through the internet archive. This is EFF's first patent project. It's called the patent busting project. Early EFF lawyers in the mid 90s identified 10 patents that they were going to try to get the U.S. patent and trademark office to revoke because we knew that they never should have been issued in the first place. This was under an old process called the reexam process. I'm going to read you a few of the patents that were in that patent busting project. These were patents that were being used to threaten people by the mid 90s. Some of them came from defunct startups who just had a bunch of patents left over and they maybe sold it to people who wanted to gain the system. Those were kind of where the first patent rolls came from. So there were patents on online shopping carts, a hyperlink, video streaming, pop up windows, banner ads, affiliate linking. Later we saw patents on a blackjack game online. Silly things like that. That's when we saw that when people were getting letters from anonymous LLCs, strangely named LLCs, saying that unless they paid $30,000, $50,000, $200,000, their small business would be shut down. And a lot of times not only were these small businesses that couldn't afford the millions of dollars it would have cost to take a patent to trial, but they weren't even businesses that supported one person salary. Some of them were online hobbies. That's when we realized this industry that had sprouted up of patent rolling wasn't just hurting people's pocket books. It was actually affecting people's basic First Amendment rights that they were trying to bring into the online world that we believe they have a right to bring into the online world. If you're talking to someone about when their package is coming and you're getting threatened, that's a problem. If you're showing someone how to search your own website with software that you made, and you're getting threatened by someone with a patent, that's a problem for us. If you're getting threatened for posting a JPEG or having internet graphics on a website that you coded, that's a problem. If I've created the president that code is speech. And so that's why we defend people against patent rolls. This process, this reexamined process didn't work that great. Let's fast forward to IPR the process we're talking about now. In 2013, Congress did make some modest reforms of the patent law. They didn't go as far as we would have liked them to, but they did create the interpartis review process. This process just means between the parties. It's like a mini trial at the US, a part of the US Patent Office, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, where you can bring evidence to specialize patent judges and say, hey, this patent, this 20-year government monopoly shouldn't have been issued in a first place. And these monopolies are a big problem in software. We've always said this is not a good fit for software at all. It doesn't work on 20-year monopolies are ridiculous for those development cycles and also often the people granting these patents are maybe not aware of the prior art. So once this new process came around, EFF, we decided to file our own IPR. We filed an IPR when there was a patent that became known as the podcasting patent. It was owned by a company called Personal Audio LLC, and they started sending around letters and ultimately lawsuits to some somewhat large podcasts, but also some really small ones. This was, by the way, and I think 2013 when even the biggest podcasts were really small businesses. To give you an example, we got Mark Marin, who was a pretty famous podcaster involved in our campaign, and he helped us out and created a lot of publicity around this Personal Audio campaign, but he himself was, he was a very small business. He had several employees at most. We actually crowdfunded our IPR. We said we wouldn't be able to file it. We wouldn't have been able to pay the fees unless we raised at least $30,000. Ultimately, the community stepped up. We had hundreds of donors. A lot of people just giving small amounts of money. We were able to raise ultimately over $80,000. We did file the IPR. The owners of the podcasting patent were so desperate to extort every podcaster in America. They were so wanting that money from individuals expressing themselves through this podcast that they appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court. It took years of litigation even after we beat them in the IPR. Let me show you about what it took to beat them in the IPR. This will give you an idea of what an IPR is all about. I'm going to put this in the chat channel too. There was a press release about when we started to fight the podcasting patent, and you'll see we had prior art. That means previously existing technology. There were things that the patent office should have known, but they didn't. For example, Carl Malamud had an online broadcast called Geek of the Week. It was pretty cool for its time. It was in the 90s. We also told the patent office about early CBC and CNN serialized online radio broadcasts that came way before this supposed this patent that personal audio got that they never should have gotten. Ultimately, we were able to knock out the personal audio patent through the IPR process and then additional litigation. IPR has become really important, really surprisingly important to us at EFF. We're surprised at actually how well the system works. It's not perfect, but it is an important part of clearing out some of the worst patents, especially ones that affect people who write software, individual developers, small companies. And that's why now we have EFF is not able to file IPRs against every bad patent. It was very expensive and time consuming. Now we have, there are new and better ways of using the IPR process to protect small developers like what Joanna just told you about, like the open source space that is defended by Unified. And right now there are powerful forces. IPR works well enough that patent trolls absolutely hate it because they can actually be held accountable. And what happens is, when people send out threat letters or lawsuits to 50, 70, 90 people, because it doesn't require millions of dollars and a jury trial to invalidate a patent now. It's still hard, but it's easier through the IPR process. When you have these super litigious patent trolls attacking whole industries and whole communities, eventually they overreach. And someone fights back. And that when they fight back it's very often through IPR. And then suddenly the patent troll has to send their so called inventor to a quasi judicial process. They have to testify under oath and explain what their invention really is and justify it to the patent office. Some IPR succeed and some fail. We just want the patent office to do its job of hearing those cases on the merits. That's what Congress told them to do. Because Congress realized there was a patent troll problem. Some many software patents, especially were being granted that never should have been granted. And now there's just been an enormous lobbying campaign to drastically limit the IPR process and Jonathan's going to be able to go into a lot more detail about it. So I hand off to him to tell to talk about, you know, some of the details of these rules and how they will really damage this important process. I want to share one more link with you. This is our call to action to our members. And it explains EFF's point of view about what's going on. And here it's called our our channel our right to challenge junk patents is under threat. And, you know, we view patents as their government monopolies they could be views a government subsidy, and some of them. We know a lot of them, especially in the high tech area, we're not properly granted. So anyone should be able to challenge them. It's okay if a nonprofit challenges them. It's okay for profit challenges them. It's not individual challenges them. It's okay if a bunch of people need to get together and pool their money to file even one challenge. And if there's two separate. If there's two very different cases for challenging a patent, then maybe both of those people need to be able to make their case. We really want people to step up and defend this, just like we defend the, so the little bit of good case law we have in patents that helps us kick out bad patents. EFF has fought for better case law around fee shifting, and we fought for better case law to let us throw out the worst of the worst software patents do it on a computer patents. So just like we defend that good case law. We're also here to defend the IPR process that it's our best patent challenge process, and we do need the community's help. Whether you do it through the Linux foundation link the unified patents link or the EFF link. Add add a sentence add your sentence about your own opinion your own experience. It doesn't really matter to us what language fits you best, but now is a time to speak up. I think, not just for freedom to innovate but really for for freedom of speech online to freedom of expression. So thank you guys for being here and listening to us and I'd love to hand it off to Jonathan for some more details about this. And I just want to echo all of that. That was really well said EFF and the Linux foundation and unified have long been working together to try to combat the scourge that is the sort of lawyer run shell companies that will sue, sometimes upwards of 150, sometimes 300 small businesses ask for less than the cost of litigation sometimes as little as two to $5,000 from these small companies and try to get them to pay, even though they know that the patents that they're asserting are not good patents. It happens more often than it should I'm on the phone all the time with small companies. But for one second unified as a membership organization with over 300 members. The vast majority of those are small companies. I'll give you some examples in a second. But basically all we do is is fight patent trolls we go out and file challenges on patents that never should have issued that were mistakes that the office made. I'm a former examiner I made mistakes everybody at the office has made mistakes. The patents are then turned around and use to hold up a whole swaths of American industry, including very, very small startups. I'll give you just one example that we were both involved in. There was an entity called sport brain that had a patent on basically a pedometer and the office allowed the patent out in 2001. They shouldn't have done it there was a lot of evidence that there were pedometers that predated that the wrinkle was that they attached some of the profile information to an internet to the internet basically. It was a pretty basic obvious invention that NPE sport brain went on with that single patent to sue over was sent over exactly 150 companies. From from the biggest to Nike and Garmin and all of the watch companies and Apple and others and Nokia who made these devices, all the way down to over 80 small companies that were trying to get their own pedometers or their own Fitbit style things off the ground. They sued match up LLC challenge runner techno gym Babylon holdings omate. They sued all of the watch companies, a lot of the apparel companies, and then they sued companies as small as lax gadgets which was apparently just a company that sold things out of a kiosk. They sued for bright matrix innovations smart hour I don't need to go on the list is very long but they sued all these companies, and then ask them for $20 to $50,000, just to go away. In some cases, half a million dollars. Using this process that Congress created unified patents which goes out and independently challenges patents and that's kind of what Congress intended. I showed six ways from Sunday that this pattern never should have been granted that it was a mistake and everybody kind of knew that but the cost of litigation is so high that without this process and without companies like unified patents and EFF were able to go out and challenge these patents. It's just not possible for small companies to fight back and I get on the phone a lot with small companies who reach out and say hey I got a letter or I've been sued. I do and I say look, it's going to cost you, even under the current system, maybe 75,000 to follow one of these things without some third party entity or some do go to organization out there, who's going to step in and help. And really the only thing you can do is pay these guys. I'm sorry but that's that's just the way it is and that's super unfortunate right that's one of the reasons why unified and the Linux Foundation and EFF are so dedicated to preventing those conversations from happening and basically making sure that small companies don't have to have to pay these sort of extortionate requests that come in via letter or via lawsuit. In this case in sport brain unified was the only party to challenge the patent, we challenge the patent at the office using this publicly available program. We went all the way through the, the purported expert that they paid $500 to show up was, you know, a sophomore in high school when the patent came out and had no relevant experience. And the oral argument was laughable and the judges agreed with us that the patent was invalid and never should have been granted. And when we got there, they had already sued 150 companies. The current rules that the office is considering. There's a lot of them, but the vast majority of the rules are basically designed to make it harder for anyone to file a challenge against this type of pattern. It would make it harder for EFF the Linux Foundation or unified to challenge. It would also make it harder for all of you to file a challenge if your company or if you as a private developer decide to want to file. It's going to limit how long you have to file it's going to make it more complicated to file. And it's possible that through no action of your own because you have a supplier relationship with someone or you're the customer of someone who's already filed and settled, you might not be able to file so you may have a relationship with a bigger tech company who has filed and settled and gotten themselves out under the current rules that they're proposing, you might not be able to file your own challenge at that point so you might be left holding the bag for even even more money. And one of all of these rules is basically that companies like sport brain will be much, much, much harder for organizations to challenge, and it will be much easier for them to go to you and ask for $100,000 or $150,000, knowing full well that it's going to be harder to challenge. And that the tools that Congress created 10 years ago that have been pretty effective at tamping this type of behavior down are simply gone. Just procedurally, and just to be kind of as clear as possible. The way it works at the agency is that they put something out that's called an ampier and advanced notice a proposed rulemaking and they claim that's advanced, but they put proposed rules out there and they give the public the ability to comment. They've only given you until June 20. So you have about two weeks. And those comments can be done online. It takes a few seconds. All three of our websites have links and templates if you want to put longer comments in if you want to just log in it takes no time at all but if you didn't know about it. That comment period would close, and then the agency would come back and say, well we didn't get a lot of comments from people. We didn't hear from the public. And so we're going to move forward with all of these many many changes that we've we've we've proposed. The understanding that I have and the understanding that others have is that the comments were proposed over the summer on purpose, in part to kind of speed them forward to make it harder for parties to comment to make it so there would be fewer comments, and also to just try to speed the process through. But there are very few provisions in there that would do anything other than kind of cut off your right or others, others right to challenge. There are specific provisions in there. There's a standing provision that basically goes and flies in the face of what Congress said Congress said anyone can file one of these. It says no not anyone can file, it has to only be litigants or it has to only be parties that have an interest, a financial interest in the patent it's kind of unclear where they're going to go with that. But everyone from the people who passed the bill, Senators Leahy and good luck and Senator good luck to former directors of the US PTO have said that they don't have the authority to do that and that that basically would overrule Congress. Nonetheless, the agency is trying to move forward and go around Congress. They basically do something that would turn IPR and turn the office into more of a playground for the rich. It's not the type of thing that will affect big companies because big companies will be able to file, they'll be able to afford it, and they'll be able to navigate these complicated changes. And that's something, however, that would absolutely affect small companies ability to fight back and membership organizations abilities to fight back because these organizations sort of rely on the freedom to approach these things in any way possible. I'll give you a couple of other examples of MPs in the past who through the action of challenges have been able to be tamped out. There was an entity years ago called shipping and transit that filed almost 300 cases almost entirely against small companies, all over the United States. They also sent thousands of demand letters, and we got dozens and dozens of calls from small companies saying, these people are asking me for 10,000 20,000 $50,000. So what's going on. The patents were on old school bus tracking technology someone in the late 90s and early 2000s, thought it would be a good idea to track school buses, and have like a central dispatcher that would, you know, tell them where the patents were not intended at all for tracking packages or for for tracking anything else that was done in the future but because FedEx include a widget on just about every website in America for 20 years. These MPs were arguing that anyone that used the FedEx widget was in violation of their patents. There's one small member of Unified that doesn't pay us anything called CD Universe. There's a guy in Florida, who for years has resold us CDs online. A pretty low margin business, a very nice guy. The website is still there you can see it if you want to want to Google it CD Universe got a letter from these guys that basically said, I really care if you think our patents are valid or not. It's going to cost you a certain amount of money to litigate it. So why don't you just pay us $20,000 now to go home. Now to a big company maybe $20,000 is not a lot of money to this guy $20,000 was a lot of money. Right, he couldn't afford that he didn't make that in a year. So he you know contacted us others reached out to us on this dozens and dozens of companies and unified was able to go out and challenge the patents, and put the entity into a license that gave all of our members and a large swath of all the people that were sued licenses, right, that basically said they can't be sued. And because of that, that NP eventually did declare bankruptcy after suing 300 small companies and getting millions of dollars in licensing revenue that they then offshore. When they declared bankruptcy, they valued the patents that they've used in that case at $2. That's in that that's in the bankruptcy proceedings right so so the patents that they had used to sue 300 people and threaten 1000 more. They didn't think at the end of the day were worth more than $2. Nonetheless, they were able to make millions off of threatening people with suit. And but for entities like unified and others, they would they would probably still be doing that today. It's one of these things where it's critical at the lower end of the scale to be able to challenge patents that otherwise never should have been granted and that are being used against developers and this is a particularly important consideration in the open source space because open source is something where all of the developers and companies have come together to say look we want this space to be free and we want people to develop things on top of the kernel. We want people suing each other we don't want to retard progress, we want to make sure that developers have the freedom to be creative and to come up with their own companies to use this as the basis of additional developments and to speed things forward very quickly and it's been wildly successful because of that right. What he used to say we don't care. We know you've agreed and we know the people that actually develop these tools agreed but we got the office to grant us a patent that says anyone that communicates between point a and point B over the internet. And we're going to assert it and so they run out they create a shell company called an NPE and non practicing entity or patent role. They come up with a funny name. A lot of these companies have really funny names. I saw one the other day. It's about loyalty point rewards that's literally called loyalty. There are entities that name them after characters in Game of Thrones. They're clearly not not serious people, but they run out and they sue people and they ask for money that money passes through this mystery LLC makes lawyers some money, and then they do it again. So, the founding principle of unified as an organization was basically the problem is that it's cheaper to pay these people off than it is to fight them. Right. And then when they are paid, even if that's a rational economic decision for a company, they take that money and they reinvested they buy more patents. And then they do it again. And they'll keep doing it again and again and again I've talked to a number of device companies were very small who've recently been sued upwards of a dozen times in a single year by similar entities. So unified and EFF and Linux are trying to cut through that using information using objective data and using legal arguments that just frankly show that those patents never should have been granted. Doing that by combining efforts of all of the members of an industry doing that by combining all the efforts of developers and doing that by combining the efforts of a lot of different companies in a particular space to say look. No one of us can afford a challenge here, but this thing is very obviously invalid and we need you to take a second look just objectively we're not saying anything about the entity they may have been sanctioned they may be bad actor they may not doesn't really matter but this pattern is a bad pattern and it's holding us up. And so because of that process, and because Congress opened it up to the public. There are a lot of people out there who make a lot of money off of litigation, who don't like it, right they don't like the fact that anyone in the public can raise a challenge. They don't like the fact that Congress gave them this powerful tool that helps them do things cheaper and easier and so they'd like to, and have been lobbying the office to erect a number of roadblocks that make it more expensive and harder to make these things and mean that lawyers can make more money in district courts, they can push people into unnecessary patent trials, they can raise their costs, and they can get more money out of them by sending them these these sort of demand letters. So the way this would work is you might get a letter in the mail as a developer or small company that from someone you've never known and never done any work with. Because I'm a lawyer who's been retained by Valerian LLC, which is a real entity, right. I believe that you're in violation of these three patents. I believe your products are in and I will sue you if you don't talk to me and pay me $60,000 license fee company will get this letter and absolutely freak out because they don't have that type of money they don't spend that a year in their legal budget right. If you come to me or come to a lawyer or come to Joe and say what do I do. Right. And you kind of have to tell them look like they don't have a legal case. You don't violate these things on on their face and you don't do this but they absolutely can sue you. And they absolutely can try to push costs on you and absolutely can try to force you into a situation where you've got to make the choice of do I pay them, or do I pay a lawyer to try to fight it. And that's just that's just not right. And that's what the, the organizations you hear today have been trying to fight and that is kind of what's at stake so I just want to reiterate this we think it's very important than anybody on the call that kind of cares about limiting that type of bad behavior. Take five minutes, go through our websites or go straight to the ampere M's website, it's a very easy interface. And from the heart, just say what you agree with what you don't agree with, if you think all of it will help pat controls. If you think all of it will be outside of their ability to do. If you disagree with with making it harder to file, more expensive to file, forcing people to file faster. If you don't have access to second and third people who might come down down the pike later. Please say so, please include your own personal stories if you have them. If not just say who you are, and that you're interested. And please do do add add your voice to the fight because if they don't get enough comments from the American public. I'm going to put some of these proceedings in place and I'll also add that there's a lobbying organization called us inventor that's out there that is right now putting comments in on the other side of this debate, and they have taken the crazy position that this proceeding is bad. Right, because the patent owners that are, they think are the good guys are being filed against right and they think that their their patents are being challenged. And that's a bad thing. And they prefer for those patents to go through super expensive district court litigation. They prefer for that. Now, I don't know where their funding is coming from but I know they don't speak for all us inventors. I know they certainly don't speak for all us developers. But I think that is going to hear from you and hear from others that recognize that this is a threat and want to keep Linux, the Linux kernel open and want to keep open source coding free of this kind of litigation tax. I think that that will serve as a good counterweight to what is a pretty organized campaign to try to say that that that this new thing would somehow benefit the small guy. Jonathan and Joe, I'd like to surface a couple of questions in the Q&A that I think would be really helpful. One is, you know what is the impact globally so what is the impact of this proposed rule change to companies and developers and individuals outside the US, and can individuals and companies that are not us citizens not based in the US comment on the proposed rule changes. I mean my understanding is you can I mean this is you if you're affected by the US patent system because you do business in the US that's a good reason to comment. And certainly, there are huge numbers of foreign patent holders and they can and do defend their interests so actually you know a lot of other people keep statistics on this I don't but some huge proportion of US patent grants are now to foreign companies and you know we have we have more than half. It's more than half now every year. Yeah, and it's a bunch of them go to great innovative companies and then there are also foreign entities that behave abusively. So, if you are on the receiving end of abusive behavior, abusive patent behavior and you're not a US resident. Absolutely, I think you should speak up. Yeah, also wanted to add that you are welcome to comment anonymously as well. Yes, a non US entities and individuals can comment or welcome to comment. You know and because of the global nature of open source software development, the fact that, you know company may be developing products and services, you know, in a foreign jurisdiction but those could get incorporated into US products and services or be distributed in the US. So, foreign entities and individuals are also at the outside the US are also are also at risk of abusive behavior by patent trolls so this is, this is a global risk, even though the proposed rule change is the only impact us patents it is a global risk and this is a hopefully global collective effort and in call to action and help prevent these rule changes for moving forward. So, I want to add to that the problem is on that you know on the other side, you know US patent law allows you to sue anyone who imports or makes or uses a patented object. And that's something that we have long said should be fixed through legislation, there should be protections for end users, because a lot of this really abuses stuff it goes for end users. In the case I wrote about a capture patent. That was being used to threaten food bloggers. That's how I heard about it. Someone who was helping out food bloggers one person businesses, half a person businesses who used captures. They were getting threatened. And of course they didn't invent capture was a Google invention, but they, they, you know, the panels are smart. They don't necessarily want to get in a Tata tech with with Google what they'd like to do is send out threatening scary letters to 50 food bloggers. The particular patent role, when challenged at the office, told the office that it should recuse itself, and the patent should be unchallengeable because the office uses recapture. No one uses recapture it was it was a ridiculous argument. And they're ridiculous. A good example of a pretty ridiculously bad actor. What one of the biggest MPs in this space is an entity called symbology, which is an entity that has patents on QR codes, QR codes have been held open from the beginning. And the thing that Denso developed for automotive parts in Japan in the late 90s that they then held open for everyone they did not patent them. And everyone can use them. Others came along later and got the office to issue patents on them, even, even though they shouldn't have, and are now suing them so there's a company named symbology that is sued dozens and dozens of small companies, simply for putting a QR code somewhere not even on a product but somewhere online. That's the type of thing that we're talking about where the ability to challenge that, that obviously bad patent is really important for small companies and developers. Is there another question you want to pick out Joanna or I will I will mention one of the questions I tried to answer in a text but I'll just say briefly you know said they said you're understanding the problem and there's, you know, I, and that there's more to do. And I just want to say I couldn't agree more I mean we're at EFF we advocate for holistic patent reforms. We think there's reforms that are needed both in case law and also some that need to come legislatively. And there is more than needed to be done this is a defensive, you know, actually, and we're trying to defend some of the space we have, but there's a lot to do and some of the things that have traditionally been used by open source communities, which are smart good defense is right like published like to make sure someone doesn't patent something to make sure you have some proof that you invented an open source thing right, you can use defensive publication as a means. But those aren't those aren't sufficient sometimes like if that if defensive publication worked perfectly we wouldn't see patent rolls using QR codes, so we need these other methods to it's this is part of a kind of a holistic set of reforms that are needed. Yeah, all that's another question one of the attendees said it if you thought of proposing counter counter proposals to this rule. What I will say is an interesting feature the process is that a lot of stakeholders have in public comments in previous years 2000 and in private meetings with the government proposed counter proposals and said hey if you're going to if you're going to say this is a balanced rules package, you should put things in you should consider getting rid of any of these restrictions you should you should focus on the merits you should make things more efficient. The office has taken a really interesting position that they're not including any of that in these proposals they're not. They're not adopting what you know I would say upwards of 300 or 400 commenters last time around suggested they do. So this doesn't represent a balanced proposal, and they're kind of just ignoring. Big swaths of the community that say that these proceedings need to be cheaper and easier, and that these these rulings don't make any sense, which is why we think it's super important that you put your comments in now. The other thing the office has said and this is in response to a different commenter is the office has has said that they are no longer meeting with stakeholders. They are no longer taking anything other than public comments, and then they will make their decision on whether they move forward. It's a weird position to take because the government usually will hold themselves open and have meetings with people but they're basically saying the only way you can reach them is through this comment process. And if you don't comment, it's as if you don't have something that you don't have an issue with it right. It just kind of reinforces how important it is to spend five minutes going to go clicking through and putting comments in on this. Because if you don't, it sounds like the office is considering just ignoring your concerns all together, as they kind of did in the last round of discussions. So yeah, I, there are lots of rules that could be proposed, what would just be doing away with this, this rule that they have put in place out of nothing that says that they can can cut off reviews they've already said that they can kind of cut off reviews on policy considerations which is something that is pretty controversial. A lot of people suggested they should just repeal that, but they're not they're not listening. So they need to hear from you, and they need to hear from from the public on that. The answer said is they asked just to call it a civic action or can education play a role. So as part of our efforts on this we have published op eds and blogs. I've been doing webinars with others. So education is a big part of this. Indeed, if you have other members of the community or if you have other subgroups, or if you want to go on Reddit or whatever. Right. And you want to tell people, look, the office is trying to do something that's going to hurt us. It's going to help these, these lawyer run LLCs make more money. It's going to make it more difficult for guys like us to challenge it, feel free. I'm doing everything I possibly can. My wife's frustrated that this happened over the summer and I've kind of been been wrapped up on webinars and with emails I posted a op ed that I did in the hill. A few weeks ago that basically just said look like this is this is an important thing. Feel free to share it online and social media. Absolutely. And do what you can to share with your peers if you think it's important but basically, this is the type of thing that kind of because it's complicated. And because it's done over the summer. I think that Washington can sometimes think that they can just push through something that actually doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of people, but that some special interest group is pushing for, which is why we're having these calls I think it's really important that people kind of push back on that. I think the education process is underway and the hundred plus people that showed up to this call, you are part of that process. You are it. You're in a group of people and they say what's going on with I don't really know what a patent is what is the stuff about a patent role maybe someone at their company got see maybe their boss talked about a patent role. This group that has the interest to come here you are the explainers, you are part of the education process. And, you know, I'll do a I'll get in a not so humble brag but our, our action was number one on hacker news on Monday so I think there is talk about it and like Jonathan said, put this information out you have links from unified from Linux Foundation from EFF, and those can be spread. I've never seen we've. I talking about IPR has always been a hard thing to message for us. It's interpartis review it's weird Latin words that lawyers use. And so we have always been careful about well how much can we try to get into the weeds with our supporters who love a free open and secure internet, but might not get this or latch on to this. But I think right now, everyone's back because against the wall and you see that by everyone who showed up here. All the organizations like Linux Foundation they're getting involved. And so I think the education process is happening now and I think people are people are getting it, which is awesome. So I'd like to take a moment and just go over how everyone can submit their comments and the resources that we have available for that and then Joe and Jonathan the meantime maybe you can just scan the open q amp a and see if there are any particular ones that we want to address and closing. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. There is a, I include the link in chat and I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll post it again. But there's a blog post on the Linux foundation website. This blog post is until June 20, which is the last day to submit comments on the header of the Linux foundation website there's a link to this blog post so if you lose the link you can easily find it on the Linux foundation website any page. There is a link here to the federal register where the proposed rule is, you can type your comment here and and submit it this way. In the links foundation blog post there's also links to templates we've created with language that you can copy and paste and customize. There's one for both individuals and corporate council at companies. So this is a text for individuals. There's text for corporate council that's quite a bit more. It's a little bit lengthier and more formal. You can copy this customize it and paste it and submit it. And again the, both the volume and the diversity of voices is really important here, you know that the more comments they receive expressing concern about these rule changes, the more impactful our collective efforts going to be, and the diversity of voices is important as well it's important to the usp usp to hear from small companies large companies startups mature entities, developers hobbyists, etc. So I'm going to read the word comment. The final date comment is in just under two weeks from now. It's June 20. Yeah, I'm going to answer a couple of comments that were online there's another bill that is in Congress that addresses the ITC that is meant to combat pat controls and litigation funders using that. It's also a good bill to support in general. It's not relevant to the comments here today. I want to attend to ask what does the usp to stand to gain from this proposed rules change and that's that's a bit of a headscratcher. This seems to be coming from outside stakeholders and others that are lobbying the agency so I don't want to cast aspersions but the way that the patent office works is that they, it's almost always helmed by a lawyer, right it's someone who comes from the industry and there's a bit of a revolving door so sometimes we think an officials think that they're responding to the public but what they're really responding to is lobbying or other lawyers or the bar and not not members of the public and so they're not always hearing directly from you it's a pretty arcane agency. So I think the US PTO here might have their heart in the right place and think that they're responding to stakeholders but they're really just responding to what they hear from other lawyers. And that's that's part of the problem. And our community speaks up when we are attacked. Usually, that's how like when people get concerned about patents, but the kind of small, you know, and to speak to this to me your average software developer is working on making stuff every day. They're not filing comments to the patent office. Unfortunately, there is a small but real group of people that is just determined to get one or more patents and make money off of them. Sometimes those are larger organizations or organize, you know, former lawyer, not former like former patent lawyers that like organize into litigation funders or patent trolls. And sometimes it's individuals who think they're going to strike it rich from not making anything and from, you know, just holding a patent and unfortunately using it to threaten others. So you would think those people are powerful lobbyists right but the thing is they they talk to the government every day. They're there because that's their dream. Whereas the people who are out there building things making software, you know, they tend to not talk to the government every day. They tend to talk to someone when they have a problem and then they come to someone like unified or like EFF. Yeah, one comment that is right one comment said something about the rules and how can you be sure that your comments are being counted and this is a good point that agency has been doing something a little bit wonky where they collapse comments that are identical to one comment or they try to disregard it in an attempt to try to process them and this is something that kind of suggests that it's best if you put your own personal stories in there and your own personal spin and do everything you can to talk about why you think it's important to fight back against NPs and preserve access to IPRs and make sure that this process can be used by third parties like Unified and Linux and EFF. Because if you don't, it's a little bit opaque about how they consider them, but they can they can try to stifle your voice and they can try to collapse those comments. So you can post them publicly to social media you can post them to Reddit you can keep a record of them you can share them with others. You can try to get there to be a call of action and that that can help. I think that is usually a pretty good disinfectant. But at a minimum it kind of counsels towards trying not to just put in cut and paste comments trying to put in your own spin and saying your piece as well, because that's something that makes it harder for them to disregard what you're saying. Right now if you look, say, this person and 1000 members of the public right they've collapsed it when they've collapsed 1000 comments together because they're identical or because they're similar right and so you just need to do everything you can to kind of make sure that they hear your voice and everyone's voices and I, I have no doubt in my mind that this community will make itself heard, and that that message will receive loud and clear by the agency and I think the agency will think twice. Before they try to do something like this, where something really could hurt a big swath of American businesses developers companies economy, and sort of really only benefit the people who have a vested interest in litigation. And that's, that's something that we don't want as a country. So anyways, we very much appreciate it. I very much appreciate the support and and companionship I guess of EFF and the Linux Foundation and all of this. Sorry, my logo is not up I need to get better at that but but we've really appreciated the call and really appreciated the, the comments and I'm also happy to talk offline over email if you'd like to reach out or if you're looking to put something online and I'm happy to look at it and just let us know we can do to help. I think Jonathan's right the original content matters a lot and it doesn't have to be a legal treat us right, you could take some of the text from the Linux Foundation and then say, And this is what happened to me and I'm mad about it. I mean if you add in two sentences, I think then you won't be aggregated together by the mystery software and it'll just be a more powerful comment. You know, it's, you can talk about just how this is affecting you and your feelings about it. You don't have to be a legal expert. I'm not aware, by the way, I have my background in journalism I ever started heard about patent rolls when I started reporting on these crazy lawsuits you know 15 years ago, and then I'm also a failed journalist and grad school and wrote for a bunch of papers and one of the more interesting MPs is an entity called IP edge, who you can Google it but there's a, there's a judge in Delaware who's sort of hauled them into the carpet but they were, they were approaching private citizens without an internet presence and asking them to hold the legal title of patents and sue in their own names to hide the fact that they were actually being asserted by this, this company called IP edge. They were truck drivers and paralegals and boyfriends and girlfriends of people that they knew to kind of step up as these patsies and fight they filed 500 suits a year for years and holding up a lot of small companies. And with this judge finally revealed some of that you can Google it it was in the Wall Street Journal just the other day. It's a pretty crazy case, but it's the exact type of entity that we're talking about where there are there are lawyers that are creative about how they organize these corporate structures who go out just to sue people just to make a little bit of money. They never go to trial. They never ever fight if someone comes out and says their patents are invalid they sometimes walk away. But they're sort of banking on the cost and banking on efforts like this that make it harder to challenge so that they can make money off of you in the system. So. Yeah, and that was a EFF actually followed a brief in that case because we wanted that investigation to continue I just put a link about it in the chat. So very interesting case it's certainly cocktail conversation someone had told me that someone would approach taco truck drivers in Texas to hold patents for them so that they could go out and sue 20 or 30 companies. anonymously. I would have told you you're crazy that makes no sense but but that's that's what happened. So thanks. Thanks to my co presenters and to all of you for attending and I just want to acknowledge a few other organizations who've also joined this effort, many of them have also have resources related to the proposed rule change on their websites open source initiative, the foundation eclipse, but still a open invention network and others as well. Thank you guys thank you all for taking an interest and joining our effort and you're the leaders talk about it more. Thanks for help. Thank you so much. I want to thank all of our panelists for their time today and thank you everyone for joining us just a reminder this recording will be on the Linux foundations YouTube page later today, we hope you join us with future webinars have a wonderful day.