 Good. So, hi. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the launch of patentpandas.org. And I am so excited to be here. Thanks to the Media Lab for allowing me to host this awesome event and also kind of helping me through the crazy disasters that I'm about to share with you all to make this resource possible. So, first of all, I also want to thank the Berkman Klein Center, where I'm an affiliate right now for also connecting to me to so many resources, again, that have made this possible. Many thanks to come later on in this presentation. So, let's get started. One more thanks to Carol Lynn, who is my kind of co-author and co-pilot in the patentpandas project. Unfortunately, she's unable to join us tonight. And so, I just want to give her a giant shout out because so much of this work would not have been possible without Carol. She's from the Cyber Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, and that's where she's a student. So, to get started, patents are kind of far away for many of us, including me, less so now. But to give you an idea of what it feels like, I've found this lovely video clip that I'm going to use for educational purposes only. So, let's see if we can get this to play. Oh no, oh wait, is this sound? Oh no, there's no sound. I'll just describe what's happening. So, there's the girl, and she's just doing this funny dance, and the stork is like, what do I not see? Oh my gosh, why is she so weird? Glass! We are in a glass factory. That's why she's walking and running so weird. And then she's like, oh my god, storks can't see glass. And then, of course, there's the wolves coming. So, this bird is me, and that's what it felt like so much of the time. That glass is patent law. It's invisible to me, but very, very important. And that girl is like all the lovely lawyers that I've been working with who do see the glass and who can help me navigate these invisible force fields that will smash my face. So, that's what it's like to deal with patent law, and hopefully I can share a little bit so that you do not have to smash into the glass as badly as I did. So, two stories. The first story is about LED stickers. This is what an LED sticker is. It's an LED light that's in the form of a sticker. It started out as a research project back when I was a student, a master's student here at the Media Lab, where my collaborators, Natalie Freed and Adam Setepin, created a class project where we handmade stickers that are circuit elements like sensors and outputs, including LED lights, and we made them in this fun, interactive scrapbook. That was back in 2011. And then in 2013, I met my collaborator, Bunny Huang. We went to Shenzhen to explore manufacturing and see how we could use work with factories to scale up research projects and deploy them out into the world. And my project for that was the circuit stickers. And this time, instead of using, you know, a team of grad students, we were able to collaborate with factories and use manufacturing processes to produce these stickers. Here's an LED sticker at scale. And we were really excited that it actually worked. And so, here is our first set of stickers. There are some LED sensors and even a programmable microcontroller. And normally, these projects would live in the lab, but we decided to see if we could get them out into the world by doing a crowdfunding campaign. So we launched a crowdfunding campaign for circuit stickers on crowd supply in November 2013. And we were very, very delighted that our funding was successful. And six months later, in June of 2014, we were able to ship on time. This is largely due to Bunny's extreme skill in getting things made very quickly and then shipped out. So that was great. And then we were able to get our stickers, our circuits, our paper craft, all over the world and now educators, like these folks, can start learning circuitry using arts and crafts, which was our intention with circuit stickers. And all was wonderful until, fast forward, to February 2016. We get this email from an acquaintance that says, hey, guys, there's this crazy, extremely broad patent that seems to cover your stickers and it seems to be a ripoff of your work. Here's what it is. We checked out the patent. What was it? It was these things. These are called light seeds. They are also stickers that are LEDs. And they were created, it turns out, by one of our crowdfunding campaign backers, which we know because all of our backers are available on the crowdfunding website, which you can see right now. So this is the person that created those. And not only that, this person named Jill also created her own crowdfunding campaign in 2015. So to give you a comparison of what this is, here's our crowdfund video from 2013. So you see you lay down copper tape. So we're using craft materials to build circuits. You stick down the sticker, add a battery, it turns on and it glows. And that's basically the idea behind circuit stickers. So now you can see this other one. Here's her video. Oh, there's no sound. Well, I'll just let it play anyway. Basically she comes in, she describes how she did this work all on her own. You can go to Kickstarter and see the video yourself. Here's who's using a pen to draw a circuit. And then she's going to add a sticker. Oh, well, we'll just go back. But you get the idea, but rather than confusing you guys with videos. So how did this happen? And what do you do when someone tries to patent your stuff? That's the important part, right? Well, first off, don't panic. That's the worst thing you can do. You want to send like an angry emailer to somebody, right? But actually that's probably not going to help. It's one of those things where you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and probably will be used against you. It's a little scary, but it felt a little bit like that situation. Next, with all that angry energy, you should make a list of prior arts. So all the projects that you've done, that other people have done, that are related to this work that happened before, to prove that indeed the stuff happened before somebody tried to patent it. So this was what my prior art list looked like. Finally, you can then look up the patent on the USPTO website. It's called Public Pair. So we did that. We found the patent and we found that she had filed her provisional. This is like the earliest, earliest. In August of 2014, this is months after we had shipped our product, many months after we had done the campaign that this person had backed. With this information, you're ready to find legal counsel, find an actual lawyer, an expert, someone who can actually help you. And that's super important because that glass is very invisible. You definitely need your lawyer's shirt to help you. So what we ended up doing is we tried to submit a letter. It had already passed examination, which means the patent was already accepted by the USPTO. But we thought maybe emailing the lawyer could help. We emailed the lawyer, showed them some of our prior art, and unfortunately nothing happened. And the patent got granted in March of 2016. So despite our company, my research papers, all the news articles, the patent still passed. And it turns out it's because examiners have very little time to review a patent. They have 12 hours to read it, understand it, search for prior art, and then write everything up, which is not a whole lot of time. And as a result, things will be missed. In fact, it turns out they pretty much look right now, mostly for other patents for prior art, which it makes sense because there's so much stuff out there. Let's start with patents, which are at least written in a legal way that's easy to cite. Of course, thankfully there are now other projects that help. So a quick plug is the prior art archive that was just started here at MIT with Cisco, where it allows people to submit non-patent prior art, and then the patent examiner will also look at that. So as that project is growing, hopefully that will provide another avenue for examiners to find prior art that's not patents. Why? Because patents are really hard to get and expensive. So timelines are important when it comes to law. And just to review, we've got 2011, we started the project. 2013, we did our crowdfunding campaign. We shipped the sticker in 2014, June. A couple months later, our backer files a provisional patent. So this is like the simplest thing possible. And two years later, almost February 2016, we find out that that application even exists. And a few weeks later, patent issues. So that was a sad story. But it's not over because guess what? About a year ago, I get this email from Jill herself saying, I want to buy my LED stickers patent because it's relevant to you. So at this point, we're like, what? So this actually is about a year ago and the patent is still active. This whole situation is still active. But actually, we're okay. Why are we okay? Because we haven't gone after her. She hasn't come after us. We have so much prior art to defend ourselves with. We just kept making LED stickers as if the patent was not there. And so far, our company, GB Tronex, still continues to be able to do this and get our work out into the world. And that's kind of the important part for me, that we can continue to create, to innovate, and get our things out into the world and do what's important and not kind of get tangled up in these legal fights. So even though it's kind of shaky, to me, that's a win. So that's the first story. The second story is electronic pop-up books. So something else that I love is blending books with electronics. This is an electronic pop-up book project that I did back in 2010. It was my first project here as a grad student at the Media Lab. And it involved making sensors out of paper and adding lights and interactive elements to pop-up books that are also programmed, make sound, glow, move. I also worked on adding electronics to Sketchbook. So how do you sketch in circuitry and explore telling stories using electronics? So here's a story about the LED who dreams to be a star, and this is kind of the book prototype that became. So in March of 2014, I was invited to go to a place called Google ATAP. It's kind of an exploratory, small group within Google. And they were interested in new storytelling interfaces. And they were particularly interested in books and electronics as a way to tell stories. And so I went in there as a visit. At first, I thought it was just visit the space, and frankly, I got to meet my heroes. It was mind-blowing what they were doing there. It quickly turned into a job interview where I was meeting with people who were like, oh, you should work with us. So in my mind, I was imagining like, oh, maybe I'll get to do a summer internship. This would be so cool. By the end of the day, I was meeting with the director of the entire department, and she was offering me a job. She wanted me to start immediately because my work was relevant, and so there was that. And it was kind of amazing, right? However, I kind of came back. I would have had to take a break from my PhD. It was just in my first year, and so I asked many people for advice, and the answer basically was like, stay in school. Don't leave just to do this project at Google. So I decided to stay in school and pursue my PhD, which I'm very happy about. Two years later, I get an email from a friend who's a paper engineer. She does pop-up books professionally saying, hey, look, check this out. Turns out Google is applying for patents on pop-up books with electronics in them, and it happened to be picked up by a pop-up blog because they're like, whoa, if Google is doing this, it's going to be so cool. Unfortunately, looked a little bit familiar because a couple of the inventors on this patent application are actually the same people who I spoke to during my visit, and when I visited them, I visited them in March, and their provisional was made in August of 2014, which is months after we'd spoken, and they did not cite any of my work in their patents. So just to give you a recap on the timeline, so 2009 made the pop-up book. March 2014, I went for what turned out to be the job interview. August 2014, they filed the provisional patent on the pop-up book. Note August 2014 is also when the LED sticker patents were filed, and then in March 2016, it was basically about a few weeks after I found out about the first one, I found out about the second one, at which point I was like, wow, so a brief interlude. Head blanket because head desk hurts, and that's kind of how it felt. It wasn't even bad anymore. It was just kind of absurd and funny that this was all happening at the same time independently of each other. So here it is. Again, don't panic. You know, when someone else is trying to patent yourself, don't panic. Make a list of prior art. Look up the application and find legal counsel. Luckily, I had done all of this about three weeks ago, so I was much more calm the second time around. So here was my prior art list that I sent out to the lab. And the cool thing about prior art is as long as it's made and has a verifiable date, it doesn't have to be a big publication, it doesn't have to be yours, it works as prior art. In fact, a cool trick is if you have a website that you want to turn into prior art, submit it to the Wayback machine, which is the Internet Archive, and that'll automatically stamp it and make it permanent. And that's like a cool trick that people use to make prior art. So just know that. And if the application hasn't been accepted, if it's not a pan yet, you can still submit prior art directly to the application. So that's the thing you can do. So we looked it up and we found what it was. We found that it was submitted after, I had visited months after. Luckily, this is where the magical moment comes in. The director of the Media Lab, Joey, happened to know the director of ATAP directly, Regina. So we were able to contact her directly and make a connection and try to sort out this kind of hairy situation. So she was basically like, oh, there must be some misunderstanding. But we ended up getting in a call with their team. And I remember during this call, they actually offered, if they added me as an inventor to the patent, then would I be okay? And at the time, I was like, no, because I'm not the only person who works on pop-up books and technology. There's so many people, you have to add all of them too. So I basically turned it down. What I didn't realize at the time is that there's a difference between an inventor and an insignee for a patent. So the inventor is the person who comes up with the invention. They're like the designer. The insignee is who gets the rights to actually use the patent. So one way to think about it is an architect designs a house, whoever owns the house actually lives in the house, and that's often not the architect. It's kind of the same situation here. So what would have happened is if I accepted, maybe, I would still be an inventor, but I would not actually be able to use my work legally because the rights might be owned by Google. So I accidentally dodged that one for a totally different reason. But now I know, and that's something to know about. What ended up happening is in the middle, Regina actually left the company, but she thankfully put us in direct contact with the senior counsel of ATAP. And they took all that prior art, all that anger energy that took to make because it's like when this is happening, what else do you do? You make a list of prior art. They took it and they submitted it to the patent application. And then the application ended up being rejected and now it's abandoned, which means it's in the system, but it's actually not a patent. And in fact, it's kind of cool because now it's prior art that's not a patent, which is the strongest prior art you can have if it's already in the system, which is kind of a good story. Something to note that I've also learned is that big companies actually often have bonuses for patents. So what does this mean? A lot of large companies have their own legal teams. And they give people financial bonuses just for even disclosing work if you get your patent, if you get your idea turned into a patent application, that's another bonus. If you're patent issues, that's another bonus. So there's a lot of financial incentive to apply for patents. So maybe it's possible that they actually didn't care so much about the work, but wanted bonuses. Who knows? It's a very different thing. I mean, if grad students got bonuses for applying for patents, I suspect there would be a lot more patents coming out of universities. So, you know, it is what it is. So what I learned is that even though I just want to make things and kind of ignore the legal side of making, it doesn't ignore me and it doesn't ignore you. And so what is this? It's patent law. And so what we did is to create patentpandas.org. And this is a website that shares all of these learnings, all of this kind of mess that we've all kind of gone through and turns it into something hopefully friendly that everyone can benefit from. So with that, a quick kind of introduction. So here's patentpandas. That will do. And also, before I proceed too much longer, let's go to about, I want to... Oh, that's not what I meant. Hello? Is that... Sorry, while I mess with my pointer. There. All right. Okay, awesome. So this is a website that was created collaboratively. All these cute panda drawings are drawn by my sister, May. So grateful for her creative contributions. It was co-written with Carol Lynn, who again unfortunately couldn't be here. And Ira Winder, my partner, was the one who actually built up this beautiful website where everything lives and lives stably in a way that's easy to access. So this is patentpandas. Everything that we write on here has also been reviewed by law clinics. So we've had support from the Harvard Cyber Law Clinic, the Suffolk Law School Law Clinic, the University Southern California IP Law Clinic. We've had support from Andy Sellars here, who runs the MITVU Law Clinic. So many law clinics. And I say this because it's important to know that there's resources out there to help you. You are not alone when something bad happens. And so one of the things that we made sure to have on here is where's my mouse? Here, which is, it's a list of pro bono resources. So these are free law clinics from schools or from volunteer lawyers groups across the US. And we're actually now contacting law firms who have their own individual pro bono programs, which means that they will do this for free to help you if you qualify. So if people are in trouble, they can find help. And so that was very important. And we're very, very, very grateful that all of these folks and more, you know, every day continue to say, like, yes, please list us. We want to help. That was awesome. And then we also have stories. So I want to share what it's like to work with lawyers to have something scary happen to you. I get the sense that in the world of NDAs, people don't really talk about this a lot, but I think it actually happens more than we think or more than we know. Anyway, so I wanted to share my experiences and hopefully there will be other people who would like to share their experiences. So you kind of know the human side of what it's like to kind of go through this and maybe learn from other people's experiences. There's also resources. This is part where patent pandas comes in. So all of those stories will point to specific resources. And these, for example, are about different topics and inside. So here's one is what is a patent and they're explained through these little comics. So for example, one of the things that I wanted to share is all that stuff that I couldn't find online. So if I went online searching for resources, which I did, most stuff that I found was either trying to scare me or sell me something, and usually they were trying to do both. And I wanted to create something that was not trying to scare or sell anything to anyone, just to give good information so that people can make their own choices about patent law. And that's why we're telling all of this, all of the information is being reviewed by legal experts so that we know it's good and worth putting up and then everything is taught through these amazing Panda comics so that they're a little bit easier to take in. So for example, and then all the information is stuff that is kind of counterintuitive because patent law is so counterintuitive. So you have a patent and maybe you probably know that a patent is kind of the right to prevent others from using a particular invention. Using, selling, importing, making, technically. But what you might not know is that just having a patent doesn't mean you can actually use it. So for example, Giant Panda comes up with a cool idea to put a rake and an umbrella together to make an umbrella rake, and Giant Panda gets a patent on it, right? And Giant Panda is very happy. Unfortunately, Red Panda has a patent on a rake. And so since a rake is part of the umbrella rake, if you don't have access to all of the patents that make up something, you can't actually do it. So here's Giant Panda kind of sad. However, if Red Panda is like, oh, I'm gonna make umbrella rakes too, but then Giant Panda has the patent on umbrella rakes. So Red Panda also cannot just make. And so at least the situation can be kind of sad because neither party can do what they want. And unfortunately, this happens a lot, but what it is trying to encourage, I think, is for inventors to work together to cross-license, to share their inventive rights, and maybe benefit everyone by sharing. So you can do things like cross-licensing and patent pools. I will note that a lot of this is still kind of an exclusive thing because guess what? To even get a patent in the first place to cross-license is really expensive. Easily costing a cheap patent is $10,000, probably will probably cost more. And it takes about two or more years to get. So they're not easy things. You kind of have to have resources to begin with to participate. So that's an interesting one. I'll show you one more umbrella rake. But I can go on forever. Another post that I thought really interesting was open versus closed. So when I hear patents, I'm like, no, it means you can't do something because it's pendant. Actually, what a pen does is it gives you the right to decide. So you can think of it as someone who owns a piece of land. Someone might say, get off my lawn. Don't come play. That's how patents are typically used. They're like, you can't come here. Don't use my invention. Don't come onto my lawn. However, you can also be a patent owner that decides to let everyone use your invention. You kind of don't prevent anyone. This is like an open patent. So you turn your land into a public park. Anybody can come hang out. And of course, and then there's the option of not patenting at all. And that's kind of like this like wild land with no one claiming rights over it. And that's kind of the most open option of all. Of course, then there's the issue of other people coming along and claiming it. That's kind of hairy. So this is a little tiny pan in the distance with a flag ready. In reality, there's a spectrum. Someone can say, no, you're not allowed to use. They can charge a fee called a royalty, or they can allow people to use it for educational purposes if they make it clear, or they could just be like, yep, all my patents are open and there are ways to open licensed patents too. So I thought that was interesting because initially I was like, oh, patents are bad or all like stop, right? But no, actually, it just gives you the right. Again, because they're so kind of expensive and challenging to get there, they're not the most accessible things in the world. There's lots of other stuff like that that I won't get into. But so you get the idea. So that's kind of our resources. And then, yeah, so you can learn, you can read stories and like commiserate with others. You can get help for yourself. And that's the idea. And I hope that there are folks who if you're interested, we are looking for people who want to, you know, contribute resources or contribute stories. That would be super amazing. And I guess with that, I would like to give tons of thanks if I can find my mouse. Here we go. Play. Did that work? Yeah. So I was going to say like, this was not a project that I did by myself. It took a huge village. And I've already noted some people, Joey who has left, but he also kind of was supportive through the entire experience. Kate Darling as well. So there's my legal experience, right? When we were going through all this, I talked to Andy, I talked to Joey, Kate, my collaborator, Bunny had a lot of experience. I mean, he was kind of suffering as well in the case of GB Tronics. But we had so much help. Andrew Torrance, another law professor who connected us to these awesome law clinics all over the U.S. until we ended up working with the Stanford Law Clinic on our case. It was really, really amazing how people were excited to help. And so I just want to thank all of them. And there's so many other people even in Pat and Panda's. Let me think. There's Carol, Lynn and Jess Field. Oh, I wrote it down. Here we go. Jess Field from the Cyber Law Clinic at Harvard. There's Ben Virgin and Lolita Darden from the Suffolk Law School. From the USC Law Clinic, Kate Lent Deveru, Austin Stanley and Jeff Perlman. They actually helped review all these posts to make sure it was good. So I'm utterly indebted to them. And again, Andy, because he gave us advice on what to write about. So with that, oh, and of course I would like to thank Joe P, my advisor who was there when I was a PhD student suffering through all this and helped kind of talk me from the edge as well as Mitch Resnick who provided me the space afterwards and my mentor Sally Rosenthal who also had a lot of experience and just kind of dealt with a panicky version of me which is not very fun, but I'm so grateful. So these are all lovely, lovely people who helped me get to here. So with that, I'd like to invite Joe up to share a few words about... So Joe has been around at the Media Lab. He is a professor at the Media Lab of the Responsive Environments Group and he's kind of seen a lot of these situations perhaps come and go and has a lot of experience within IP law as well. So I was hoping he could share with us just some thoughts about how this connects with research and the experience as students and as an academic doing innovative work. And then we can break out two questions. Thank you. Yeah. I guess we'll share this. Thanks, Gishe. Okay, I'll have a seat. I've got nothing formally prepared but G and I talked a lot. We've hung out since and during and talked about patents. My experience with patents has been in many different areas. I've got a bunch having been MIT faculty and researcher for many years. So we file. And when we do, most of what I do, I file on very little. We file maybe one or two patents a year. We tend to see something as a potential product. If it looks like it's enabling research, it has a lot more left before it really anneals. I don't really know what I would patent. We just let it go and publish. We publish it on everything. But if it feels like this could be a product of one of our sponsor companies in the Media Lab, for instance, could run with or a student could just start up around, then we'll file a patent. So I've been through that process. I was head of the IP division here, or the IP group at the Media Lab for a while. So I kind of dealt with everybody's patents and lots of these stories for a while. And the last five or six years, I've been spending a small amount of my time, like many of us MIT professors with gray hair have done a lot of work in areas that have become big and commercial, like in my case, wearable sensing. We get asked to be expert witnesses all the time in patent cases. So I last few years said yes to some of them, gotten involved and really have seen on the other and in intimate detail how patent cases are actually prosecuted and what people do about patents. As a matter of fact, what I generally do is I basically take patents out and blow them away. So I know about the prior art. I've been working actively in the field. And 80% of the patents that go through IP review, this is the streamlined patent review that doesn't involve district court, which is a cheaper process. Still we're talking potentially 100K so it's a corporate level thing. 80% of them get blown away because they're bad patents for exactly the reasons you say. It's not always a malicious inventor. Matter of fact, what you talk about here are cases of fraud. This is outright fraud. It's not just somebody, you know, innocently stumbling into an idea. The idea is already there. They don't know. They file a patent. The examiner doesn't know the patent gets granted. There's an excuse there because somebody is just out in the woods and not doing the homework and they file a patent. These people knew and they ripped you off. So that goes deeper than just innocently stumbling into your woods. I mean, this is some extent fraud. So this is a deeper set of issues than not a lawyer, but, you know, that goes deeper. But yeah, there are a lot of patents where basically they didn't know what was around. Inventor writes a claim. Could be somebody working in a company who writes a bunch of claims. But no, if you're working in wearable computing, especially with the stuff that I was doing back in those days, we all kind of did this. You can't just say that this patent is bullshit. Pardon my language here. It's patent-panda after all. This is bull. You have the emoji. Bull emoji. Because, yeah, we all know, look at this paper. No, you have to make a detailed argument. You have to go claim by claim. You have to talk about exactly how the prior art relates to the claim in particular. And you have to do it with the right nomenclature. This is what lawyers do. They're very good at it. I still can't really write like that completely, although, you know, I work on these documents all the time. It's a careful process. And every claim that's there, if it's dangerous, you have to shoot it down with this argument. And, yeah, I mean, you see patents used. Companies use patents. And I see there's a reason for it. You know, I'm not anti-patent. I think patents can be used in terrible ways. I mean, yeah, I am anti-gun in many ways. But there's that argument, right, guns don't shoot people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't buy that one. In patents, though, it's one of the ways that companies interlock. It's one of the ways they relate to each other, right? They each have this whole suit of armor of patents. And when they come, you know, into a clash around an idea and application domain with a building product, the patents are the ways that they basically decide to work. One of the ways they do that, right? So, you know, you have that great idea where they share, they cross-license. That oftentimes happens. Sometimes it happens painlessly. Oftentimes it starts with a skirmish, where you hold your patents out. They'll hold their patents out. They'll hire someone like me to blow away their patents. They'll hire some other professors to blow away our patents. So it's a whole battle. And it escalates, right? There's a district court case. It gets huge. Companies can afford a bit of this. If it gets out of hand, they'll usually settle. How big the companies are, how big the stakes are, that will define when they actually cave and when they settle. It can get to be tens of hundreds of millions of dollars. It can be just some thousands of dollars, right? But it's the way that these companies interact. If you're a startup, and this is one of the reasons why we patent, you want to have typically a portfolio of some sort that defines the area you're doing, that is basically your intellectual property so that when VCs and other people that you're working with and you want to raise money from, they can see the patent as part of your value, your patent portfolio. So it helps you as a startup. So I think there are reasons for them. The rule of law I think in the end of the day is very good for the world. And if you didn't have it, these companies would just bust up each other's property, right? So you resort to violence or means that are physically in the physical world. And patents is in this kind of capital world or intellectual world. So that's kind of how they play it out. So I think it's better having the rule of law than not. On the other hand, if you apply it against a lone person like you, it can be intimidating, it can be frustrating. I think for this to be a really deep issue, you have to get typically to a point where you notice you, right? And there are companies all the time that are starting up in areas that are crowded with patents. I work with a lot of them here that come out of the Media Lab. They're too small now to get hit with all these patents that are floating around. They get a bit bigger companies or even individual inventors that have these patents that work with these law firms that are pro bono or not pro bono that are just guns for hire. We'll see an opportunity to extract a toll. So they'll go after these companies with these patents that kind of vaguely relate and involves legal proceedings. So they want a settlement. Some sort of a tax can be variable level. If you're a troll, it could be a significant tax. If you're just a little inventory, you just want to be bought off by a relatively small amount. So they use the patents that way. You're going to have to be a target. You're going to start getting patents thrown at you. And not from people like this woman, from people that are just inventors, because there are people that just come up with these ideas or they think they do. They file some patent. So in order to monetize this process, they try to attach to companies and lucrative enterprises to get some sort of a tax. So you see that quite a bit as well. But you have to get typically to a certain size before it gets to be a problem. By that time, hopefully you've got a strategy of dealing with this when it happens, because you're more of a company, you're not just G and Bunny trying to do it on your own. So you can... And of course, in your case, you had the resources of MIT if you needed it, right? Because this is where you're done here. It's research, if somebody goes after you, and this happened to us, people throw patents at me, but people basically come in after us saying, oh, we have this thing, we've done this work, blah, blah, blah. If it gets to be a threat, the MIT legal office can come in and actually help you. So usually that defuses, it shuts it down immediately once we get the legal office involved. If you're a loan inventor again, you don't have that. So thanks to Pat and Panda, maybe there's some recourse. I would like to add a little bit on the scale of things before we do questions, which is that it is actually a really good point. It really depends on the size, because if you think about it, or if I think about it in my opinion, not fact, people typically go after you. They'll throw lawsuits. They'll send you these cease and desist letters to basically try to make money. If you are too little and broke to be able to pay real money, there's really not that much incentive for better or for worse. That's actually something that can make you or me feel a little bit better where it's like, well, I can keep making. Maybe this is right. Maybe this is not. But even if it's not, will someone come after me? Because I have nothing to give unless you are harming someone's business or they think they can make some sort of money off of you. There's less of a chance of that. I'm not saying that's always the case. Oh, PS, I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. It's a practice law without a degree. And same with Pat and Pandas. It's for educational purposes only. But yeah, I think scale and who you are kind of has a big part of it. So even though, like, in theory, one might be infringing and by law you shouldn't be doing this in practice, things are often so different and that's why it's so important to have those Sherpas, like actual lawyers kind of tell you what's the truth versus what's like written down. So I thought that was kind of really important and one of the biggest lessons that I learned. Yeah, so thanks, Joe. No, I think that's a great way to put it. You never know, right? People can hassle each other about anything if they're mad enough. But generally to be a serious target of a patent lawsuit, there's got to be something worth suing. So yeah, you get a company of a certain size. You're going to attract them like, you know, bees to honey at that point. But you have to cross the threshold. And then you have some legal mechanism that can just deflect them, deflect them quickly. There's a snake that's trying to gobble you up. Yeah, then you have to very carefully, you know, snake gobbles up handy. You have to very carefully build your defense and that's more expensive, more complicated. But then you're big enough that hopefully you can deal with it. There's another thing in defense of patents. I mean, look, it's totally flawed because we can kick 80% of them out without much trouble, right? So it's a flawed system in many ways. The patent office realizes it's great that we have this new thing with the prior archive. Patents, even working with the patent lawyers, they prefer another patent than some paper. 90% of the time because the lawyers, the patent appeals board will understand another patent right away. A paper you have to define, oh yeah, really what came out then, it really was publicly available. There's a bit more of a process to defend it. Patent's easier. It was obviously there because it's in the system. But this new thing hopefully may make that more transparent. Trade secrets of the antithesis to patents. And this is the thing. If you got rid of patents, companies still are going to have problems. They're going to try to nudge each other out of the way and granted if they can't resort to mafias to alt-terrorism, physical terrorism, they work with trade secrets. And I've seen a bit of that and that's uglier because a trade secret is more about what's in your head and what's in your employee's head at a given time. If you were working with company A, you would work with company B afterward. Company A gets upset about company B and they sue for trade secret violation. It involves individuals, not just institutions. Patent is about knowledge. Trade secret is about what an individual divulged. He said, she said, not so much about this is prior art, this is not prior art. It's a dirtier trial. Patents, despite their problems, are cleaner. They're much cleaner. And as an expert, I can say this was known at that time because of this work and this clearly anticipated this. Sometimes you combine two or three things, one or two things, always better just have one thing. But there's a clear argument this was known in the art and this claim is useless because of it. And it's about the knowledge, not about what somebody said or divulged. So yeah, patents serve purposes. They're flawed though. They're not the best way to do it. Maybe we get into the era when everybody is doing very well with the ubiquitous robot economy and we all have social welfare to make a living. We can just do cool things because they're cool. I think it's the ideal future of music. Some of us have talked about that. We have to make money out of royalties. That's another kind of IP. You just do the stuff you like and you're supported to do it. I think the world is so much better off when that happens. If we get there, that would be great. Until we get there, we're going to have something like what we see with patents. So I guess, thanks Joe. With that, maybe I would like to invite my sister Mae up and we would love to answer some questions. For folks who might be tuning in remotely, I have my phone on Pat and Panda so you can go on Twitter at Pat and Panda and then send us a question if you like. But in the meantime, maybe if there are some questions in the audience, we'd be happy. First off, thank you so much. This is an awesome resource. Given what you just mentioned about the idea of music and other types of IP, do you plan to expand this later on to look at copyright or other things? I know that you've only had this experience with your personal experience here, but it seems like a really great idea especially expanding it beyond for other areas that students and other researchers might run into around here. Yeah, that would be really cool. I have to admit, yeah, we will do one at a time and this one is the most emotionally motivated one for me right now. But I don't know, a copyright cat or something would probably make a lot. We thought about it. So the T, but yeah, maybe. So if we could find the help and the resources, I think it would be really cool to expand. There's also other stuff happening at the Media Lab. Berkeley School of Music Media Lab thing that we've done, which is looking really mainly at future copyright and protection of work by individual artists so that you can get some traceability and renumeration for your work when it actually goes out. Defending the work is supposed to taking down copyright but thinking of new ways to do that. It's very, very active. Lots of ideas are proposed through that and it's all open so you can look into it. I think it's called The Open Music Consortia, something like that. Yeah, and I mean I'm not a huge fan of copyrighted music either because I'm a fan of Negative Land as some of you know and what they had to go through for really making new works of art out of other people's music was horrible. I like musicians to be paid at the end of the day somehow. Thank you G. Seems super helpful and I know I've heard some of the stories from you in the past but it's really neat to see it up kind of holistically presented on the website. I have two questions. One of which was born out of an experience that Asaf and I had with Medrack when we were trying to get that patent to do the lab and the question was we both wanted an open patent. We didn't want to use it because neither of us had the bandwidth nor do we now to try to do a startup around it. We wanted to keep other companies from absorbing it and then meaning that we couldn't use it in the future but it seemed maybe at the time that the Media Lab was less interested in an open patent because it wasn't a clear case to be made for the benefit of a member company. So I guess my first question is has that changed or could open patents still be pursued at the Media Lab in some beneficial way? And the second question for you guys is how is it on the international scene and do you have thoughts Joe in particular about China and IP sharing or battles between different countries that may not respect each other's respective patent laws? A tiny bit about open patents since that's the thing that I was trying to research when this project started which is that the patent itself isn't open or closed it's what permissions you give to it so I imagine what would happen is you would get a patent through the Media Lab and they would have to be okay open licensing it and my understanding although I could be wrong is that patents are really expensive so a cheap one is 10k a normal 120k a complex one like the one you might have if you're here is closer to 30,000 and as a business model it doesn't quite work that would be my cynical view I don't know perhaps the policy is different but at least when I think about the technology licensing for MIT as a whole they are they think I've you know I've kind of talked to them a little bit about open open source open etc and they were like yeah if you don't want a patent something we're not going to make you but you know if you do we want to make money from the patent that we got so that was the reaction that I got from the higher level technology licensing here at MIT maybe the Media Lab is different maybe Joe you can add to that yeah I think G hit the nail on the head and for us to do a patent we have to invest money behind it and significant money and usually we want the argument in IPCOM the IP committee that meets here why you want a patent and typically is first to defend a startup or to work with a sponsor something of that sort in this case actually there are lots of people interested in med rec so I don't know exactly why your advisor wanted it to be open and maybe didn't like the idea of patenting for that reason I mean one other possibility is to file a really bad patent so people file provisionals all the time which are just the paper so you could sit down and just write your paper and then make up some claims whatever you don't care the prior art aren't the claims in the patent no one cares about you know if using patent for prior art about the claims so much it's the disclosure so it's what you write down before that so you could write down whatever you want before that and then just make up some claims it would get rejected but it's going to be there it's prior art and that disclosure is always there so that's something to add on that a clarification which is that you can make prior art by publishing research papers you can take that provisional patent if you got one put it on your website and archive it on Wayback Machine if you just submit it to the USPTO as a provisional patent that's actually not prior art because it's never published and the USPTO doesn't actually read provisional patents so they wouldn't know about it so it only becomes prior art if you publish it on the web where other people can access it it's a very strange quirk and provisionals are weird they're only good when you get a patent issue because it gives you a priority date but the if you actually file an application you can make a crappy application and that would work the application would be published but it costs money to file an application too that's thousands of dollars it's not ten thousand maybe it's a few thousand but you wouldn't maintain it you'd abandon it so it's just a filing fee I think this new idea if there are ways of learning examiners I don't know why they just look at other patents I mean there may be some legal argument but time is the big deal I've dealt with examiners and he retired couldn't get a hold of them it was amazing this guy called nine o'clock he's blah blah blah patent examiner what is a fake call but he talked about the patent he knew about it so it really was him but yeah these guys are under the gun and what lawyers would do we talked about that they'll wear him down so if you are working with a firm and they want to get their patents accepted so the law firm is going to try to get them accepted even here at the media lab we do that you quite often would get rejections on the claims sometimes it's because the examiner doesn't get them sometimes he has a good prior art but there's always a dance and if a company really wants that patent the lawyers will wear the examiner down they'll keep doing new appeals to office actions and they'll change a few words here and there and eventually I've seen cases where just the examiner gives up and the patent is issued even though it's clear the examiner is right to reject he's rejected it four times five times he's come in with different patents different reasons they change a few words and eventually he says oh I'll let you have it because he's under pressure probably and the patent gets out when it really shouldn't it's a job of people like me doing IPRs where we kick them out but that's a lot of careful work whereas the examiner if he was able to do his job properly would have kicked it out I'm just trying to kick it out so better tools for examiners to reject patents that are bogus would be wonderful and bringing in other prior art is a good way to do it we're living in an era of ubiquitous knowledge it's if we can bring more of that to bear I think we'd have stronger patents that are real patents and ones that are just redundant ideally wouldn't make it all the way across to make trouble for international stuff that's a great issue I mean very current issue and I'm not an expert in that I mean we typically if a patent is important to a sponsor company here at the media lab will enable a PCT to be filed which lets us file patents around the world at least we get like a year or so to file them in the EU and China wherever we want to do it it costs money for that so we don't fund it ourselves we have to get that money coming from the company that wants to license the patent just explain what that means so if you're not super familiar with patents you may not realize that patents only have say in the country that they're filed in so you can get a patent in the US you can get a patent in China in many other countries but if you have a patent in the US and you don't have one in a different country you don't have rights to that invention in the other country a PCT is something that you can file when you first file your original patent you like hold this spot you reserve the right to be able to apply for those same patents in all these other countries you can imagine it gets pretty expensive to try to get a patent in each of the different countries which is probably why people typically don't so it's kind of a tricky situation I just want to give that background yeah and patents in other countries can be used as prior art too so German patent I've been on cases where German patents are used to halt other patents or patents from various places the other thing that can happen is a defense I don't know if we can go after products in China probably ways there's more diplomatic pressure working with companies that work in US and China together but we can halt products at the border here and I've been involved in cases with the Federal Trade Commission where you know there's a violation and you can go after people that way it's like going to a patent court just your court or IPR so on and so forth you can actually go to the Federal Trade Commission and say there's a violation and we want to stop the patents at the border so even though it's made in China blah blah blah there's a violation of our intellectual property rights here so I'm going to stop these products before they enter the US that could be something inside of an iPhone for example right so it's an American manufacturer it's made in China but there's some issue about the IP with this thing and some part of its chain so you can stop that thing at the border before it comes in it could be a trade secret too two more comments I'm also not an expert on international but I do understand that like I was going to say so in China there's also a patent system and so people can apply for patents my understanding is that it's very hard for someone who's not a Chinese citizen to get a patent so you have to like find a sponsor there so it's like super complicated it is like very hard and I think that's probably some of the issue I don't know I am not an expert a kind of interesting anecdote though is that people seem to really believe strongly in the US patent system and so one reason why many people in other countries might get it is because it's like hey if your invention is valid enough to get a patent in the US there must be some legs to what you're doing so that's kind of one part where it might come up but again not an expert other questions Hi absolutely fabulous I'm thrilled with the website you've put up and also your explanations of all of the patent stuff I actually head up the licensing office here at MIT and so I have two questions I have two questions for you one is can we do a link from our website to your website because the sort of the way in which you've described this stuff is exceptional and it's the sort of information that we would love to get out there for everybody I mean I was very interested in your stories too and the second thing is if you thought of doing the show on the road because and I'll be more specific IAP is coming up in January, February and I think this session would be extraordinarily helpful for people and I'd be happy for the TLO to sponsor a presentation to students in January, February whenever that session is because one of our efforts is to get information out although we are usually getting involved in patenting research of faculty and not students people come to our door all the time and so what we've been trying to do over the last couple of years is provide more generic information about this topic because you're starting companies whether or not MIT owns it quite frankly is irrelevant the more knowledge we can get out there and I think this tool that you've got is fabulous so if you're interested in that I'd be happy to talk to you I know my pleasure congratulations to you all and thank you, yes that would be so cool and I guess just a few words on that I mean my experience is like I wasn't thinking about patent law but I like to make projects and get them out into the world and I feel like as crowdfunding and the internet allows every one of us to be an entrepreneur in some way I feel like this is going to become more and more relevant so my hope is to make it a little less bumpy for everyone else out there fewer glass walls to smash into cool are there any other questions I think that's time actually I have a question what would you say to people who say the rake and the umbrella example is just too ridiculous thank you so you may brainstorming what should giant panda patent and Ira was the one that kind of suggested the umbrella rake as a joke and we kind of went with it there is a patent on the umbrella rake it was accepted and issued in 2014 so just so you know welcome to the world of patents so I guess with that thank you all so much for joining me hopefully this was an entertaining educational experience thanks Joe for your support like the entire way from the very beginning and before that thank you may may for your awesome pictures and making it as accessible as it is to Ira for so facilitating in so many ways and to the media lab and the Birkman Klein Center and Andy and all these lovely people who help when things go wrong as my partner likes to say and as Mr. Rogers likes to say when things are going wrong look for the helpers because they're there too so that's what this is about thank you and with that reception downstairs fifth floor cafe right thank you thanks for joining bye