 Well, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change, where you foresee for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in our 2016 webinar series on the topic of intellectual property, and specifically what hardware innovators need to know. My name is Yana Aranda, and I'm the Director of Programs here at Engineering for Change. I'll be serving as your moderator for today's webinar. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit more about our topic today. Hardware innovators and social entrepreneurs are often concerned with intellectual property protection for their products, especially if they have limited experience in the domain and are operating in resource-constrained environments. Planning for the protection of an innovation is an important investment in future success. Also, we've invited Dr. Isaac Rudenberg, Senior Lecturer and Director of STPID at Strathmore University in IROD, to share insights about what legal IP protection options exist that may be suitable for your innovation. We'd like to welcome and thank you for joining us today, Isaac. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to thank the U4C webinar series team in general. If anybody out there has questions about the series, or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, I invite you to contact the team via the email address visible on the slide. The webinar you're participating in today is part of U4C's professional development offerings. Information on upcoming installments in this series, as well as archived videos of past presentations, can be found on our webinar's webpage. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd also like to invite you to join us in the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag U4C webinar. Before we move on to our presenter, I'd like to tell you a bit more about U4C and who we are. U4C is a knowledge hub in a global community of over one million engineers, designers, development practitioners, social scientists leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. These can include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy solutions, improved agriculture and more. We invite you to join U4C by becoming a member. U4C membership provides cost-free access to relevant and current news, professional development resources such as this webinar, opportunities such as jobs and fellowships, and a growing database of hundreds of poverty alleviating products in our Solutions Library. Members enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with our site, the better we will be able to serve you resources aligned to your interests. We invite you to join our passionate global community and contribute to making people's lives better across the world. Check out our website to learn more and sign up. Today's webinar is a collaborative effort with the ASME iShow, a hardware-led social innovation competition open to individuals and organizations taking physical products to market that will have a social impact. Upcoming iShow sponsored webinars will focus on issues related to hardware-based solutions, improve and provide practical insights from the iShow expert network. In addition to today's webinar, our next webinar will be on June 14th at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, and the topic will be using crowdfunding to raise capital and will be joined by Indy Go-Go. On July 12th, we will be joined by Logro and the topic will be using the Lean Business Model for social innovation. Check out the first new professional development page for registration details. If you are already a new first team member, we'll be sending you an invitation to the webinar directly. Now, a few housekeeping items before we get started. We'd love to see where everyone is from today. So in the chat window, which is located right below where you see the participant list, if you don't see that, just click the chat icon on the top right-hand corner, please type in your location. And I see some folks already typing in the Q&A, so let's go to the chat window. Here I am. I'm in New York, New York. You guys can see it. I can see a number of folks, Montreal, more New York. We see throughout the United States, Seattle, Arizona. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We have some folks from Belgium, and I see a lot of folks entering their answers into the Q&A. Again, I'd like to encourage you to please type in any comments in the chat window. You can also send a private chat if you have any issues directly to the Engineering for Change admin. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window, which is below the chat, to type in your questions for the presenter. That way we can keep track of them and make sure to address them at the end of the webinar. Again, if you don't see this, you can access it by clicking the icon on the top right-hand corner. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and encounter any trouble, try to stop and then start. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. So thank you again, and we see a lot more folks have entered their answers. Welcome to from Germany, from Canada, from Kenya and California. All over the world, welcome today to the webinar. All right. Following the webinar to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour for the session, please follow the instructions in the top of the E for C professional development page, and the URL is listed on the slide. Now, with that, I'd like to introduce our presenter. Dr. Isaac Ruttenberg is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Stipit of Strathmore University. He received dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Chemistry and Mathematics and Computer Science from the Colorado School of Mines, as well as a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Ruttenberg also obtained a J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law. He has registered to practice law in California and also registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Dr. Ruttenberg has authored articles for a variety of publications and spoke at numerous conferences in Kenya, primarily focusing on the practical aspects of intellectual property. We're very excited to have you here, Isaac, and I turn it over to you to lead us through the webinar. Great. Can you hear me? I'm out and clear. All right, so let's get started. I would like to extend a special welcome to the students from Kenya. That would be Stephanie, one of my students. So I know she's taking my intellectual property class, and I might just call on her for some of the subject matter today. I should mention that I am fairly informal in the way I typically do presentations, so this is a very different platform for me. It's my first time doing a webinar, and I guess we'll see how it goes. I tend to try and be very interactive in teaching, and so I might stop if you ask questions. I will most likely stop during the presentation and answer them, but certainly we'll reserve a lot of time at the end for Q&A. A few other things to note. One is that in Nairobi, I don't know how many of you have ever been here, but it's raining now, and when it rains, one thing you can not exactly count on, but it happens quite frequently as the power goes out, and the power goes out to the internet also does. So if I suddenly drop off to the face of the earth, it's most likely for that reason. All right, I've put up my first slide. I hope you can all see it. This slide is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, in the sense that I obviously do not think engineers are dummies, but in fact I have grown up. My father was an engineer. I went to the Colorado School of Mines, so I was completely surrounded by engineers. I have great respect for engineers. I think they are some of the smartest people as a group. I would actually like to know what kind of engineering you all do. So if you get a chance, you can type into the chat window what type of engineering. If we have a lot of mechanical engineers and no chemical engineers, I won't talk anything about chemistry, but excellent. Thank you very much for that. So as those come rolling in, I'll continue on. Okay, so let's go on to this slide. So the reason I put dummies there is, no matter how smart you are, intellectual property can be very unapproachable. And particularly for engineers where you want everything to be very logical, you want it to follow rules. Engineering is very much like that. Intellectual property is not like that. Okay, it does follow rules, but those rules are made by lawmakers. And there are two things for which you do not want to know how they're made. One of them is sausages and the other is law. And this is certainly an example of that. So for the next hour or however long we're speaking, don't assume this is all going to make sense because a lot of it doesn't. And don't assume it's logical. Don't assume that people really thought this through and had the best interest of anybody in mind, other than perhaps those making the laws or those with the most money who could influence the people making the laws. Because most of that doesn't apply. This is sometimes quite difficult to follow and does not make sense. So if that's how you're feeling, definitely do not feel alone. And we'll try and make this as straightforward as possible. The other thing to note is that I've studied this for many, many years. I teach this at an introductory undergraduate level and also starting a master's level class course on intellectual property. We spend hours and hours and hours learning any one of these particular topics which I'm going to introduce to you and glance over essentially. So by no means will this be exhaustive. Even as an introductory level, this is not at all exhaustive. But with that all said, I hope you will at least get something from this. And as I mentioned, questions are really very welcome because you know best what issues you're facing. I could talk on this for hours, but maybe it's not as helpful as if you ask me specific questions. So with that in mind, well, okay, a few more background issues. One is that intellectual property is not really about technology. I mean it is at some level, but it's more about the law. And the law will say one thing, the technology you might be able to argue is a great technology and various aspects of it should be covered by intellectual property, et cetera, et cetera. But if that doesn't fall within the law, it doesn't matter. With law, you ought to go by the book. There's something called Black Letter Law for all of us lawyers. By the way, if any of you are lawyers, please do let me know in the comments. I don't expect anyone to be, but if you are or if you have a strong background in intellectual property, you can let me know. I don't expect that. And lastly, this does not say anything. What I'm going to discuss does not say anything about the quality of inventions, of products, of anything really. Intellectual property is not usually about the quality. Particularly patents. A patent doesn't say you have a good invention. It only says you have a patentable invention. I see someone is planning to be attending often. That's excellent. So if someone comes to me and they say, I've got this fantastic invention, I've just spent five years of my life in developing it. It's going to revolutionize the world. It's brilliant, et cetera, et cetera. The hardest thing for me to do, and I have to do this frequently, is tell them I'm sorry it's not patentable. For whatever reason, and usually it has nothing to do with the quality, but more about the law and specifics in the law, it's really quite difficult to tell someone who's just spent so much time that their invention is not patentable, but they have to understand it has nothing to do with the quality it has to do with law. All right. I fancy myself as an amateur astronomer. So I'm going to take an analogy here. We are going to start with the view from Earth. So this is the view of the moon from 200,000 miles away through obviously a reasonably good telescope. And I'm going to ask the question, why? Why are we doing this intellectual property thing? Well, at the 200,000 mile view, the answer why is really about control. We are talking about control. Who controls what it is that you create? These are creations of the mind. Intellectual property is all property in the sense of creations of your mind. It's usually intangible property, although in most cases it would lead to something tangible. For example, a patented process would lead to a product. And that product is tangible, obviously, but the method of making it is intangible. But what we're talking about really is control. Who controls that property? However you want to define the property, that's what we're looking at is what, who can we control in the way they use it? Who gets that control? And generally speaking, the ones being controlled are, well, you a lot, those who are not holding the intellectual property. So the general public, the other engineers, other inventors, the one who holds the patent can control others who just do not hold the patent. And finally also at the end of the day, it's also a lot about who holds the money. So employers end up with a lot of control. And we will talk about that more in depth. So you are on earth, you can see, we're now talking about control. What if we get closer? Here is the view from Apollo 10, as they were circling on the moon. This is the 10 mile view. And now we would want to ask, again, why are we doing this intellectual property thing? And in theory, control, this control that we have instituted, this legal control provides benefits. Benefits include incentives for more invention, more creation, et cetera. Well, yeah, to make money, exactly. But an incentive can be money, an incentive can be, oh, you control this property so now you can go make money, so now you should go and create more intellectual properties so you can make more money, et cetera, et cetera. So in theory, it's supposed to incentivize creation and invention. And then the other side of the coin is that the general public is, in theory, supposed to benefit as well. And particularly from patents, the way the general public benefits is that in order to get a patent, you have to disclose what it is you're doing. You have to tell the whole world what it is and how it is you're doing that patent today. That patented invention. So in theory, the general public, meaning everybody in the world, benefits from the presence of patents because you can go and look up how it is that the state of the art is being done. So there's transparency of inventions, et cetera. There are other justifications for other types of intellectual property, but let's just leave it at, everybody is supposed to benefit somehow. These are balancing acts done by lawmakers to try and incentivize disclosure, incentivize innovation, incentivize good products, and in return, you know, the general public is supposed to get benefits as well. So I see someone is mentioning a slogan would be trademarked. That is true. We will get to that for sure. So lastly, Apollo, I think this was from Apollo 14, landed on the moon. But now, why are we doing this at the micro level? The surface view. Well, so if you think, you can think of the surface view as a couple of things. One is the personal level. Why would you as an individual want to patent anything or get any intellectual property? One is the sense of fairness. You know, you work really hard. You create something really unique, interesting, helpful to the world. So perhaps this property is a bit of a reward for hard work, and it's also recognition. And so, you know, there are a lot of different ways of creating. There are a lot of different ways of inventing. And so a lot of different intellectual properties start popping up. And these are sort of flags or stakes in the ground of claiming specific areas of property. One would be patents, which I've mentioned already. Maybe copyrights is another. Trademarks. Trade secrets. Know how. I'm going to describe most of these five. Then some more esoteric versions, design patents. Integrated circuit masks might be relevant to some of you. Traditional knowledge. Probably not so relevant to you, but certainly in Kenya it's a hot topic. Genetic resources. Again, very hot topic here. Technovations. You probably have never heard of these. They're really only in developing countries. And so I won't really talk about those. Plant varieties. Those are becoming more and more important. So lots and lots of types of intellectual property. And these really are only, I wouldn't say these are exhaustive at all. Lawmakers love to make laws, so they make all types of interesting intellectual property. And each one of these is really just created out of essentially nothing. The law is created, and all of a sudden you have a new type of property. Technovations is a perfect example of that. It didn't exist for a long time, and some law came along, and now all of a sudden you're getting people claiming that they have technovations, and nobody even knows what they are. And certainly no one cared before the law came along. So it's an interesting process. Anyway, let's go on. Do not be afraid. People have gone this path before you, before me. There are people who have done this. So with all of those different types, you can still understand what we're talking about. Maybe not fully, but enough to be dangerous. All right. Another question we should ask. Okay, so I saw a lot of people were from America. That's great, the United States. This section is very specific to you, although in other countries this is going to be fairly similar. In our Constitution, the United States Constitution, Article 1, which tells about the powers of Congress, Section 8 says to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Congress has the power of securing for a limited time two authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries. This is the basis for patents and copyrights right here. And it couldn't be any more basic. It couldn't be any more well-grounded than in the Constitution, the original Constitution. It's not even in any of the amendments. It's right there. Physical embodiments. Okay, I'll get to that in patent law. So I'm coming to that, to the comments that I just saw. So anyway, Congress is the next level, and Congress passes laws. They pass the patent law. They pass the copyright law. They pass trade secret laws. In fact, that's right before the President this week or next week. They create these laws, although I should also mention that some state-level laws can also be created that involve intellectual property, very few, but some, and most of this is federal law. So here's the patent and trademark office. They're SEAL. They administer all of what we would call industrial property, so property that is useful as opposed to copyrights, which are more creative works, not intending to insult artists that their work is not useful, but it's generally not considered to be industrial property useful on an industrial level. Then after that, you get more international. There's the World Intellectual Property Organization. And that's dozen to grant patents or trademarks. Those are all done on a national level, but it does interface with the national offices. Then the World Trade Organization is also very important through an international treaty. And finally, we end up in the courts. So these are all the people who are involved, the levels who are involved. And of course, Shakespeare says, let's kill all the lawyers. Hopefully not myself included. I'm a scientist first, but lawyers do tend to muck things up. So certainly that's what we've got. But I would have to say the worst offenders in all of intellectual property are the journalists. No offense if there are any journalists in the audience, but I cannot tell you the number of times I've read an article where they meant to say trademark or copyright and they said patent or vice versa or any of that. All these intellectual property terms are completely used interchangeably and by no means are they interchangeable. They cover completely different things. They have completely different rules. And journalists tend not to care. So don't say I'll try not to get your news from your intellectual property training from newspapers. Those are the worst sources. I would rather you read Wikipedia, which tends to be much more accurate than newspapers or journalists. But of course, I'll give some better resources at the end of the presentation. All right. So on to a specific type of intellectual property. This one being very specific to patents, sorry, technology being patents. Patents are all about technology. In fact, if something is not useful, you can't get a patent on it. So it has to be usually what's called a solution into a technical problem. There are various different ways of saying that, but in general, patents only refer, only deal with technology. So I'm going to give you a few examples so you can understand what was patented. I'm an amateur radio operator, so Morse code. Well, back in the day, we had to learn Morse code. I don't even think you have to do that anymore, but anyway, this was the first telegraph key which people used to use for sending Morse code. That was patented back in 1881. Let's see, 17 years is the original duration. You're correct. Well, actually, I'll get to that in just a bit. I'll address the comments that are coming in the chat. Keep them coming. I do appreciate that. After 1881, not too much longer, the airplane, believe it or not, was patented. This was the Orville and Wilbur rights. The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur rights, they're patents here, shown here. Then, I don't know if you've heard of Engelbart. Douglas, I think, was his first name. He invented, okay, based on many others going before him, but he is generally considered to be the inventor of the computer mouse. As you can see here in the 1970, he obtained a patent for the mouse. Now, I've given you some fairly disruptive technologies, or maybe not disruptive, but incredibly important technologies. You don't necessarily have to be so important to get a patent, and the technology doesn't have to necessarily be so critical to society. Anybody can get a patent for almost anything, as long as it's a technical solution or a technology. Here we have Michael Jackson. You may remember back when he was performing, he had a particular song where he would lean very, very far forward, and so far forward that it looks like he was about to fall, but he never, of course, did fall, and then he would straighten back up to standing straight up and down. Well, Michael Jackson was good, but he was not that good. He was not beyond the laws of physics, and in fact, gravity did apply even to him, but he patented a way of doing this. You can see next to the picture of Michael there, I've got a picture from his patent. This being one of the drawings, and basically there was a little clip inside of his shoe, which meshed with a little clip inside of the stage. If you go back and look at those videos, you can see that the stage goes dark for a second, and then the light come up, and you can see him leaning forward, so what he was doing was sticking his feet into the clip there. So we all know how he did it, because the patent tells the story, but for 17 years, or roughly 17 years, he was the only one who had the ability to make that. All right, how do you get a patent? And I'm going to accelerate now because we're actually taking longer than I expected. You write an application? In the application, I notice, actually, let me, in the application, I notice someone just mentioned claims. That is correct. Basically, what you patent is a single sentence which describes your invention, and it's called a claim, and that claim gives the boundaries of your invention. So at the end of every patent, and you can go and find millions of these online, you'll find a section called claims, and that is what is patented. So in an infringement proceeding, I'll look at the claims, I'll look at the product, and they'll see if they match. And those are also what's examined. So the claims are looked at by the Patent Office for the various requirements of patenting, which I'll mention in a minute. And if they pass that, then you get grant. The Patent Office says, here's your patent. You can go now and enforce it. You can take people to court. And then people who you claim are doing your invention, if what they are doing matches what you have claimed and what has been granted as a claim, then you can collect damages. And finally, after a specific amount of time, in the United States this time is 20 years from the initial filing date. So it used to be 17 years from the grant, the data was granted, but it's now, yeah, it's now 20 years, and this is fairly standard around the world because of international treaties. It's now 20 years from the original filing date. So if it takes five years to get through the Patent Office, your patent term is basically 15 years. If it goes through in one or two years, you get more than 17 years. All right. What can you patent? You can patent products, which includes formulations. So this is machinery. This is chemistry, chemical formulations. This is specific compounds. You can patent methods of using any of the above, methods of manufacturing any of the above. And you can patent software, sort of. There's, I noticed some of you are software engineers. By far, computer engineers I should say, by far, you know, software is the most complicated stuff I would say in this, and I really don't want to get too deep into it until I see a question from someone and then I will. But just be aware that there are probably more software patents or what do we call software patents than any other in terms of number, in terms of actual importance. I don't think it's quite the same. But someone is asking for a patent on a method of use. Absolutely. So a really good example of that would be in pharmaceuticals. And my particular favorite example is a particular blue pill, a triangular blue pill, as I recall, that are used for sexual dysfunction, that being Viagra, of course. Well, the original, Viagra is actually a compound called Syldenafil. And the original use for Syldenafil was as a heart medication. It made your blood vessels dilate. So that was seen as good for the heart. They were giving people the medication in trials for heart conditions, and they noticed a curious side effect, which the smart people at the pharmaceutical company said, oh, well, we could patent that too. And so they obtained a patent for a different method of use of a compound that was already known. So you can say a method of treating a human being by using a chemical, like the compound Syldenafil. That's the classic method of use. Some of those are not actually used in, you're welcome. Some of those are not allowed in other countries. You can't use, you can't do method of treatments of human bodies in a lot of countries. But lawyers are clever, and they always find a way around that. So it's not really worth mentioning. All right. How do you qualify for a patent? You have to satisfy these three criteria in the United States. And most, well, any country that has a straight patent will have these three criteria. Novelty, inventive step, or in the United States it's called non-obviousness, and that's really useful. In some countries there is what's called a utility model or a petty patent, in which case you just delete the second requirement. It only needs to be novel and useful. Novel is very low standard, so anything that's new in any way at all, if it's different from the prior art, in any way it's good, you're good. Inventive step requires something more. It has to be not just inventive but new, sorry, not just new, but actually significantly different from what went before. All right. Moving on. Trade secrets must, so think also technology, anything that could be patented, most likely can also be comic trade secret. As long as there is some efforts to keep it secret, and it has some value for being secret, you can get a trade secret on it, and it's sort of a misnomer to say you can get a trade secret. It is a trade secret until you lose it really, until someone discloses it. Coca-Cola is widely believed, popularly believed to be the most valuable trade secret. I would highly disagree with that. It's really only valuable because of the lore of Coca-Cola being a trade secret, the far more valuable part of Coca-Cola is the trademark, but we can argue that anyway. Things you can trade secret are generally technologies and other aspects of business, such as customer data or customers, customer lists, data about them, providers of services, various things like that. That's sort of information that you took an effort to collect, and you take an effort to keep secrets, and it's valuable because it is secret. That's stuff you can get trade secrets over. Now, staying with technology for a little while longer, we have know-how, which is a little different from trade secrets. Imagine if you will, you tell people, I'm going to now patent the method of making bread. I take flour, salt, yeast, and water, I mix them together and I add heat, and you get this beautiful loaf of bread. Well, the first loaf of bread is probably not going to look so beautiful, and pretty much other people who come along and read your patent, you patented this idea, flour, yeast, salt, water, combine heat and combine them with heat, and I get bread. The first loaf will come out, okay, maybe not so pretty, maybe the bread was, it rose a little too much, and then fell, maybe you cooked it a little bit too long, maybe you cooked it a lot too long, but anyway, the know-how would be exactly what temperature produces the best bread. All of these are bread, okay, maybe the last one is beyond bread now, it's more charcoal, but you have bread everywhere here essentially. It may not be the best bread, but if you want to know how to make the best bread, you have to go to the people who filed the patent application, and they may have created some best practices after the filing, which work really in the patent, so that's technical know-how. All right, I'm going to get to copyrights. Let me look at these questions that have come in real quickly. Okay, on the question of assignment, I'm going to cover ownership at the very end, and on hardware and software, I'll show you the process and the outcome. Generally, no, but let me see if the rest of this answers these questions, and then I'll come back to that. So copyrights, we've talked about patents, that covers useful stuff. I'm going to run through the last few slides in just a few minutes so that we have more time for questions, but copyrights are a mess, and the reason that they're a mess is because they're automatic and they're immediate. For anything you create that's creative and falls within the categories I've listed here, books, plays, paintings, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, any of this stuff that you create is automatically and immediately protected by copyrights, so all of us own copyrights, and a lot of copyrights, in fact. Probably in the hundreds, in college you own hundreds of copyrights. That also includes any software you make, and so, you know, it can become a real mess when you get all these property rights that you didn't even ask for. There's really no, it's very difficult to not get copyrights, so people go out and they sue over copyrights a lot, and it's just quite a mess, but anyway, these are the types of things that are covered with copyrights, and if you look in your head, it's got to be creative. Music, plays, books, okay, computer software is creative in the way it's written, so all of these fall under copyright. And then finally, as a form that I'm going to cover, and as I mentioned, there were many other forms, but this is the last one. Branding, if you create a business and you want to sell a product, sometimes much more important than the product is actually the branding. And a lot of these companies, as you'll see here, spend a lot more on the branding and the advertisements than they do on the product itself. So, trademarks, service marks, trade dress, design patents, et cetera, et cetera, social media, all of that stuff falls under branding, and in many ways it's super important. Now, for those of you in the U.S., you might know what I'm referring to here, what is really important about branding, well, I can go on to the next slide. Goodwill, goodwill or goodwill is very important for your brand. You want to have goodwill amongst your audience, your consumer, and then hopefully you'll sell more products that way. The opposite of that might be certain companies that have really actually given us a perfect example of how you lose goodwill. And so they're sort of a textbook example that you can now understand goodwill through. Social media, another way of branding, of being innovative, unique, and social media to me and to sit at the center that I direct, we consider social media to be an intellectual property. Very often it's almost indistinguishable in terms of form and function from a trademark. So you have to be very careful with how your company, if you spin off a company or your creative company, be very careful with your social media. Korean Airways felt this was an appropriate tweet and the people of Kenya certainly did not feel this was an appropriate tweet. KitchenAid, I'll just let you read these. KitchenAid apologized after this tweet about Obama. I don't know why a company would ever say anything like that, but they did. And of course anything on the internet is forever. You cannot delete it because people take pictures of it and retweet it, et cetera. And then finally, I had never heard of partly agro-private limited in Mumbai, but they were the target of this pretty horrible thing that someone did. They tweeted this about their product and then they lost, it was retweeted like 55,000 times within a few minutes and then they lost a lot of, and this actually affected their business. They lost a lot of business because of this. So they sued naturally. They couldn't find who tweeted it. It was an anonymous account. They ended up suing Facebook and Twitter. And that never works. So there's something called, well, there's an exclusion for ISPs and OSPs for liability. So it didn't work, but that's the sort of thing that can happen. All right, I think this is the last topic, essentially the last topic, and that is ownership. Now, there are two things to keep in mind. Inventors and authors are for different things. Inventors are for patents, authors are for copyrights, and basically they are the first owners of whatever it is that is patented or copyrighted. But they may not be the last owners or the immediate second owner might happen immediately. So an author might write something and then the copyright might transfer immediately to their employer. Typically this happens with employers, employees. If you are an employee, essentially everything you create within the job description certainly, but okay, let's stick within the job description. All of that belongs to your owner. It owns by your employee, your employer. So follow the money. Who is paying you to do this invention, to do this creative work? And if they are paying you to do it, under most circumstances, this is particularly true in Kenya and a lot of developing countries, the owner is the employer or the contractor. In America the rules are slightly less strict on that, so in some cases authors end up owning. But basically when you become an employee, you don't expect to own what you create. And then also all of this can be modified by contract. If you contract with your employer or your contractor differently than the law says, then your contract controls. And that is something that doesn't happen very often, but certainly can. All right. Oh, and the employer might have the right to file patents in any case. So even before you've applied for a patent, your employer might be the one who is the only one authorized to file. And if they don't file, then you might get the right, but generally speaking it's the employer who has the right to file. Data ownership can become extremely complicated. Who owns your data? What data is it? Where did it come from? How is it generated, et cetera, et cetera? Sometimes copyrights cover databases. In Kenya they certainly do. And so collections of data might be copyrighted, in which case who is the owner of that? It might be the author, it might be the employer, et cetera. It might be portions within a database that are owned by different people. It can be very complicated. Ownership is one of the most complicated. Open source, and I'm going to block that with Creative Commons. These are both referring to the same thing essentially. These are ways of licensing, of giving people the right to do things with your copyrighted works. So open source, there are dozens of different open source licenses. They say different things. They allow people to do different things and have different requirements of the outcome. So someone mentioned with off-the-shelf hardware and software, particularly software. Can you patent processes and outcomes? Well, aside from patenting, you may not be able to, depending on if it's open source or not, you may not be able to create proprietary software. You may or may not be able to. You may have to relicense it under the same open source license. Aside from all that, the outcome needs to be unique. Now I'm answering a specific question of can you patent a process and outcome from off-the-shelf stuff. If it's new, if whatever the outcome is new and was, as I mentioned before, is non-obvious in the US. So the likelihood of that is probably pretty low, but I could see it being a possibility if you're using it in a different way. All right. These are things that make you go, hmm, for those of you who are older than 30, I think you might know this person here. Okay. Sorry. A few last things. IP can go very far. I mentioned who owns data. This is a picture of a modern farming tractor somewhere in Midwest. They basically punch into computers, where they are. Actually, the computers tell them what to, the farmer, what to plant, where to plant. They actually, the computers, based on the huge databases of data, tell the computer on the farming equipment what's to plant and where to plant, and it's just, it's really quite incredible if you look into what is essentially the most basic of human behaviors, farming. It has now become absolutely incredibly complicated and data-driven. And as I mentioned, data ownership is complicated. Farmers don't want to release data, et cetera, et cetera. You've got machines being controlled by software. You can't control, you cannot modify those machines because those software are protected by copyright. This is actually a screenshot from a computer farming simulator game. So it can go a little far. Some people say it can go way, way too far. And I would tend to agree with Adam on some models. And then finally, IP can go extremely wrong as well. This is a patent that was granted to some inventors from a university in the United States basically using turmeric, the spice, the root essentially in wound healing. This had been done for generations in India and it was eventually withdrawn and validated as patent for the patent office in the U.S. thought it was good enough at least initially. All right, these are some resources. Basically, these are national patent offices, international regional patent offices, WIPO is the World Intellectual Property Office, PIPA, PIIPA, Public Interest International, Public Interest Intellectual Property Advisors, and CIPA is our organization. And most of the pictures I provided in this presentation, I did not obtain the rights to put into a presentation. So please come and visit me in jail. I'm only kidding, of course, because most of this, you know, I'm pretty sure this would be covered under what's called a fair use or fair dealing depending on which country you're in. So anyway, I'm happy to take questions now and I'll go through now the chat and answer as much as I can. And also, you are allowed. I do not mind if you email questions. Thank you so much, Isaac. That was very, very thorough. And of course, we already have some questions coming in into the Q&A and encourage our maids to please enter your questions into the Q&A area to keep track of them. So I'm not sure if you addressed this deeply, but there was a question that came to the chat very early on on how does IPR apply to physical embodiments, i.e. is manufacturing and artisanal production covered by contract law or copyright law? So the physical product, if the product itself is new, for example, a medical device that's never been built before, that would be a patented device. If you're thinking more of carvings, the product itself is not new, but the manufacturing method might be new, in which case the method might be patentable. The product itself might also, if it has no useful, okay, this gets a little complicated, but sometimes the product itself might be covered under copyright, particularly sculptures. So soapstone carvings, for example, are very popular in Kenya. If you've got a machine that's making soapstone carvings, each of those carvings at the end of the day is copyrighted as a sculpture. So there are lots of different ways it might be covered. Okay, great. Another question that has come in is from one of our listeners who's interested in getting any suggestions and there is a developed world company owns the IP for something that this individual would like to use in the developing world context. Is there anything that they should be aware of and understand in terms of buying that IP? I'm not quite sure where this question is going, but... Well, let's see. So first of all, you should understand that all intellectual property is essentially regional. In other words, a patent in the United States is not valid anywhere outside of the United States. That does not apply to copyright though. Copyrights are valid outside of the country in which they were originated, but let's stick with patents. So if you are a developed world, if you're a company in the United States and you patent something in the United States, anyone in the developing world can in theory create the same product and not have to pay you royalties. But of course, if their product ends up getting to the United States and being sold there, then that's a problem. But as long as it's in those other countries, they have the right to do that. If you patent in those other countries as well, you can then exclude them that way. And so it can be a very extensive process to do that. And most people don't. They would pick a few very important countries and then outside of those two important countries, it's really a free-for-all essentially. But that's why there's also what's called know-how, which I described. So the patent might describe the invention but not the best way of making it necessarily. So one way of dealing with this is that you license the know-how in addition to the patent in all countries or in specific countries, even where there aren't patents. That might be something that can happen. Very interesting. So kind of building on that, another listener had a question relative to the geographical constraints and if there are different applications for multinational patents of those exists? So there are a few. The United States is not party to any of them. There are two regional, what we call regional organizations in Africa. One is for English-speaking countries and one is for French-speaking countries. And then there's the European Union. There's also one in Asia that's fairly small. But those are the only international, what I would call international patents and they only cover the countries that are party to those regional treaties. There is no such thing as an international patent. There is an international patent application that's called the PCT or Patent Cooperation Treaty application and that is oftentimes mistakenly called an international patent, but it doesn't give you any patent rights at all. It only gives you an application which you can then convert into national applications. So another tricky question has come in and I think this one is going to be interesting, but what is the best time for a product or concept to go for a patent? Since at the start of the age, a lot of things change rapidly so the first version is finalized. Yes, that is the $64,000 question and every single case is different. But the general rule is you want to patent it after you have made significant enough development in the product to be able to describe it thoroughly, to be able to explain to the skilled artists in the audience basically which is someone of ordinary skill how to make and use your invention and it has to be the final invention that you're going to be marketing hopefully. But do not wait so long that you have one or two things happen, possibly someone patent to the head of you and we have a first to final system so if you wait too long someone might get to patent off at first or someone else discloses that invention either accidentally or intentionally based on what you've told them or based on independent research. So once someone tells the world what it is that you're doing or what they're doing and it's the same as what you're doing, that potentially removes your ability to patent. So it's always a very tricky analysis and there's definitely no one answer but I guess the only one answer would be consult an intellectual property of patent lawyer. If it's too early, if it's too early they'll tell you and if it's too late they'll tell you. Well luckily we have one on the webinar right now so you know where to find one there. Exactly. A few more questions that come in and I think we'll only probably have time for those two. So question regarding the know-how and is know-how patentable? And in your example if someone patents quote unquote bread but not the production method can I patent my better way to make bread using the same ingredients as listed on the original patent? Okay, so you've actually asked two questions. One is can you patent a method for making bread if the original patent only said the ingredients to making bread? First of all you wouldn't have an original patent that only gives the ingredients because the patent has to disclose how to make and use the invention. And if you say here are the ingredients for bread but you don't say how to make it even with a, you know, if you don't say anything about how to make it that's not a valid patent and it would not, theoretically would not be allowed by the patent office. You have to at least give one plausible way of making bread in your patent. Now you may not have given the best way maybe you didn't know that there was a better way. Maybe you have only baked your bread at 300 degrees but you find out after you filed the application that the best way is actually to bake it at 350. Then you can go back and patent the additional information potentially if that additional information satisfies certain rules it has to be, you know, you have to do it carefully and again consult a lawyer for this but it's possible to patent to the know-how. It's a very, I wouldn't say uncommon but it's more common to keep the know-how as something you license with the patent itself and that's generally, there are so many things that go into an invention. You just can't keep going back to the patent office and filing and filing and filing and most of that stuff is not going to be patentable anyway. It's more of a product optimization. That's very helpful and I think we're going to hit our last question here. Would you kind of discuss the possibility of someone else patenting your novel but untatented product even though you have previously sold the product? Can open source or creative comments protect from this possibility? Yes, so let's see. The patenting process is not required to sell a product ever so you don't have to have a patent to sell something but someone else might patent something that prevents you from selling your product and if they were the first to the patent office and they filed their application before you made public the same invention then they would get a patent and they would be able to exclude you from making it but if they filed their application after you had already been selling your product and what you've been doing is referred to as prior art you have basically precluded them from filing a patent application because you've already disclosed to the world this invention and as I mentioned in the beginning the theoretical reason for having patents is to encourage people to disclose their inventions if they're already out there in the public domain there's no need to do that so the law says that once you have put it on for sale if no one else has filed an application by that date in theory at least you would be able to knock out their patent you would prevent them from getting a patent and therefore prevent them from stopping you from selling continuing to sell. Julie noted so with that we're going to wrap up the webinar and I'd like to thank you, Isaac, for joining us today for sharing your extensive knowledge and your 90s references with all of us and I'd like to thank all of our attendees if we didn't cover your question we did have Isaac's e-mail up earlier if you didn't catch that then please feel free to follow up with us at webinarsandengineeringforchange.org for those of you who are seeking professional development hours please note the code listed on this slide when applying and I'd like to thank you all for joining us again and don't forget to become e-first team members to get information on our upcoming webinars for those of you who are interested in recording we will post it in a few days and you can feel free to share it no patent required so thank you everyone thank you Isaac and have a fantastic morning evening or afternoon depending where you are and we look forward to catching you on the next e-first team webinar Thank you