 All right. So I am here with my slides. I usually say that power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely, but nonetheless I'm going to use slides for this presentation. And I'm going to talk about how companies are hacking the patent system. So the ways that companies are collaborating to find alternative ways to reduce the problems with the patent system without changing the law. This is actually from a paper that I did in law school that I wrote for EFF in clinic in 2014 and updated in 2016. And this is actually how I got into the cryptocurrency space. So back in 2015 there were a bunch of cryptocurrency lawyers who were noticing that there were a bunch of patents being filed on cryptocurrency technologies. And they wanted to figure out how to develop their own crypto patent pledge and I had written this paper so they asked me to come talk about them. These patent pledges and how to develop them. And I was like why better figure out what this cryptocurrency thing is before I go talk to all the cryptocurrency lawyers. And so fast forward here we are today and I'm the general counsel and head of policy at Protocol Labs. So today we'll talk both about these patent pledges, patent aggregators, and also specifically how Protocol Labs itself is hacking the patent system and how we at Protocol Labs think about patents. So I'll start by talking about defensive patent aggregators. So these are companies that pool the resources of member companies by charging membership fees that are adjusted based on the company size. And they will use these fees to purchase patents or patent licenses. And then they will grant perpetual licenses to their members. And so the members will end up with a license to these patents. And then they will sometimes then sell the patents, so it's like a catch and release model. They catch it, they license it to their members, and then they release the patent. And in addition to buying patents, these defensive patent aggregators will also often challenge patents through PTAB proceedings, so ways that you can invalidate patents. And it's good for aggregators to do this because they can use their pooled resources rather than individual companies having to try to invalidate patents. So RPX is easily the biggest of the patent aggregators. It has more than 250 members and has spent almost a billion dollars buying patent rights, claims to represent more than 10% of the transaction activity on the open market for patents. But RPX is pretty controversial. It was actually founded by two former vice presidents of intellectual ventures, which is the biggest patent troll. So I've often heard RPX compared to the mobsters who will sell you their protection. But if you don't buy it, they'll break your windows, right? It's also controversial in that it buys patents from trolls and then sells patents to trolls. So it actually incentivizes troll lawsuits by essentially funding them. And really RPX and trolls have complementary business models. And this is one of the major differences between RPX and unified patents, which is the other aggregator I have on this slide. Unified is a lot like RPX, but it will never do business with trolls. And it also really focuses on acquiring and challenging patents in particular technology zones and really focuses on challenging patents in PTAB proceedings. So now I'm going to move on to talking about patent pledges, which is another way that companies are working together to hack the patent system. So patent pledges are commitments that companies make to license their own patents in a particular way. So these can be multilateral or unilateral. With a unilateral patent pledge, I think the purest example is what you're seeing with Tesla here on this slide. So this is a blog post from Elon Musk in 2014. It's titled, All Our Patents Are Belong to You. And he basically writes, Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who in good faith wants to use our technology. So there's a lot of initial skepticism and he ended up clarifying no. Really, competitors can just go ahead and use Tesla's patents for free, no licensing discussions required. And he really explained that that's because the electric car industry is really, their competitor is not other electric car companies, but is gas cars, right? And so it makes sense to do innovation in this open way. Six months later, Toyota also announced that it would make more than 5,000 of its electric car patents available royalty-free. Another example of a unilateral patent pledge is Twitter's Innovator's Patent Agreement. We actually adopted this at Protocol Labs. It's a little unusual for a patent license in that it's actually a clause in employee contracts. And it's a guarantee to employees that if they assign a patent to Twitter, if they're the inventor on a patent, Twitter won't assert that patent offensively without the inventor's permission. So it's effectively a veto right. Now, the original IPA had what I called fondly the unless we want to clause. And so Blockstream actually created a modified version of the Innovator's Patent Agreement, which closed that loophole. And we at Protocol Labs adopted the Blockstream version. And we have that in our employee agreements, which I'll talk about a little bit in a moment. In addition, there are multilateral patent pledges. So I think the purest example of a multilateral patent pledge is the Defensive Patent License, the DPL. So any company can opt in to the DPL network by pledging to never offensively assert any patent against any other company that has also opted into the network. So you must have all of your patents as part of this. Unfortunately, this is something that really requires network effects. And the DPL never took off because there just weren't people who were contributing their patents. And I think the reason for that is that companies had to dedicate all their patents to the DPL. So it never really took off. A thing that did really take off is a slightly different version of that, which is Google's License on Transfer Agreement. It was originally developed by Google. Then it was spun out. It's called the Law Network. It's just like the DPL, but the licenses only take effect if the patent is ever transferred. So imagine you're a company. You sell your patent to a troll or any other company for that matter. Every other company in this network will then have a license and doesn't have to worry that whoever you sold it to is going to sue them. So it's a little bit less onerous, and so it really has taken off. It also really actually took off among a lot of blockchain and cryptocurrency companies. There are some additional types of multilateral pledges. Two examples here. One is the Mossbolt, the Mozilla Open Source Patent License Agreement, where Mozilla will license its patents for free to anyone who wants to license and the cost is that in return, the licensees have to make two promises. First, they have to agree not to offensively sue open source software projects, and second, they have to give any open source project free licenses to any of their patents. And so one thing that's really interesting about the Mossbolt is that you don't have to take any affirmative steps to obtain a Mossbolt license. You automatically have a Mossbolt license as long as you're abiding by these two promises. And the Open Invention Network, the goal of OIN is to create a patent no fly zone around Linux so that companies can feel secure making significant investments in Linux. So to accomplish that, OIN acquired hundreds of patents that it licenses for free to any company that promises never to assert its own patents against Linux technology. So that brings us to the protocol labs permissive license stack. So we rolled this out in February of 2019, which was shortly after I joined protocol labs then as outside counsel before coming in as general counsel. And the permissive license stack that we adopted has several different pieces to it. And it's based on these three principles, which is that all protocol lab software should default to being freely available forever. The people who build things should have input into how those things are used. And if we believe that permissive open source licensing is untenable for a particular technology, we should be able to carve out specific pieces of IP but only after a thoughtful open process. So there are a couple of different things that we did. One I mentioned already. We adopted the innovators patent agreement. And another is we created this protocol labs patent non-aggression pledge, which says that protocol labs won't enforce any of the patents on any software invention that we own now or in the future basically unless someone has sued us first or one of our third party that's using our technologies. And we make it very explicit that we intend this to be legally binding. Another thing that we did is we actually wrote from scratch a CIIAA that really is intended to be a take the usual CIIAA model and flip it on its head. So typically with CIIAAs, it says we own everything except what's listed in exhibit A and you have to kind of explicitly carve out what the company doesn't own. This is the opposite. This is a CIIAA that's written in plain English and that is intended to only own IP so that we can make it publicly available. So we do that through a couple of things. One is our patent non-aggression pledge. One is the innovators patent agreement and the other is our default open pledge which is where we make our software available under an open source license by default. So I will wrap up there. It's been such a pleasure to work with protocol labs these last few years, see how this open licensing has really been working in practice and it's been wonderful to be here today and talk about these ideas in a bigger, more philosophical way. So thank you.