 Great. So by way of introduction, my name is Monica Ortel. I'm one of the folks on the PL legal team. I have a background in IP. I've done a little bit of patent prosecution, a little bit of litigation, kind of everything between so super excited to be exploring this topic with everyone and just figure out what kind of changes we can make and how we might be able to make some things more efficient. So as you can see, my talk is on tinkering with the patent system. So it'll be on a survey of various patent reforms. So first I'm going to start about working within the legal system, talking about a few things that people have done in the past to try to optimize for various things, which has traditionally a lot of times been for speed, speed of getting things out the door. And then I'm going to talk about one mechanism how people have worked outside of the patent system with prizes to try and incentivize certain behaviors without kind of the patent dance and patent litigation and the holdup that that might cause. So starting with the law abiding folks, there have been a lot of reforms that have been made within the patent systems of the world. And this has some benefits because a lot of these systems are generated so they can be very globally interoperable. For example, keeping patent terms the same as other countries, et cetera. But of course the drawback is that it's very slow. And if it's really slow, if you make a change and it doesn't work, it might take you a while to sort of reset and sometimes optimizing for one quality will negatively impact other qualities. So the first slide I have up here is the AIA, a big change that went into effect for patents in 2013. And one thing that happened there was changing from first to invent to first to file. So interesting change because it did create some efficiency in not having to go through inventor notebooks and always say, who put this first on a napkin in a cafe? But it created this race to the patent office as well, which might have some negative incentives too, like filing a patent when you're still figuring out exactly how it works, which is kind of a no-no in the spirit, like in the actual letter of the law, but I think people do it anyway. The other thing I wanted to quickly touch upon was the idea of utility patents. So you can see you have these in China and in Germany, oftentimes shorter duration meant to be for fast moving tech fields. They often have a much faster publication time, which is probably great to try to monetize, get things out there and also spread sort of innovation into the world so it can be compounded upon. But the problem is that oftentimes, they also have lower substantive requirements for review. And so Germany and China both have these systems now. Australia, interestingly enough, had this innovation patent system. And I found out a few days ago that it was very short-lived actually. They basically found that they had these, I think maybe something like five to eight year long patents with basically not a lot of substantive review. They could kind of be challenged down the line and you could like file innovation patent and then a normal patent and then like elect the normal patent later so you have kind of longer protection from like the beginning. But they found that people were using these to create these massive patent tickets because they would just say, well, I'm gonna file here, I'm gonna file there. It's not really gonna be reviewed. Let's just create like this massive swarm of patents. So I thought this was an interesting case study because they actually were really reacting quickly to this and you can see that this was only in effect for really a year and a half or so. Okay, and then over to the next side of things, kind of working outside of the patent regime. Prices are one mechanism that I think has, they've been around for a very long time. The two examples I have on the left side of here were both from the 1700s. The probably most famous example was the longitude prize where British parliament wanted to create ways for people to accurately measure longitude that didn't result in so many ships being lost at sea. In the middle, canning as well, that was Napoleon in the late 1700s trying to feed his armies and canning methods of preserving food actually are still used today. And on the right, I have billiards. These were originally made in ivory, which even in the late 1860s was becoming scarce and obviously much worse now. And the prize money awarded to the first cellulose-based billiard ball, some people credit that to the modern discovery of plastic. So some really great examples in the past, obviously still used today, but I'm gonna jump ahead of those. So I think that there are some differing incentives between prizes and patents and one of the first ones I wanted to talk about is just who's dictating innovation and how can we frame prizes in a way that you don't just have a centralized small group of people controlling the purse, maybe that's crowdsourcing things, maybe that's having bounties, maybe that's opening it up and allowing more people to sort of dictate what might be important. But that is one thing that I think is important to think about when you're structuring prizes, like who's making the calls, is there a gatekeeper issue, but at the same time, when you're putting out an affirmative prize rather than just focusing on sort of market awards of I have a patent, I wanna monetize it, you can also have prices that are more public goods. So I think it's kind of good and bad and there are ways to sort of tailor this. The other thing, time-based incentives, there might be some kind of different mechanisms there. Patents are first to file, so you're incentivized to move really fast whereas prizes might be structured in a way where people have more time to kind of perfect innovations and get it to really a working market model and you're having to compete against other teams as well. So there are some really interesting things to think about there. Okay, moving to, sorry, moving to the next slide here. What happens to IP? And this is something that I think is really important here too because there are prizes that don't have any IP provisions, prizes where the person sponsoring the prize gets the IP. And then there's also patent buyouts where maybe you say, you're not gonna get a patent on this, this is just gonna be a publication and you've gotten your prize money. And I think that's really the best for making sure that you have rapid dissemination of innovation and can build upon that, but you do have some sort of last incentives down the road from being able to, you have the information asymmetry between how much you think a patent or an invention is worth and how much it actually is worth in the market based on what's happening kind of downstream. And then also you can see, I have this graphic, private versus public institutions. There's a lot more private prizes, but there are some public prizes as well. And especially with those, I think it's important if taxpayer money is going to those prizes, having no IP restrictions at all could cause a kind of double taxation problem. Okay, and, sorry, I'm losing my mouse here. Okay, and then this is kind of what I was starting to like think about a little bit this week and this is like very like stripped down where do you spend money? Where do you gain money? What are some of the differences and how can we make things more fair and sort of like equitable over the lifetime of the technology? So you can see that like with patents you have a little bit more of an upfront cost with prosecution, you also have litigation costs, but I think with patents they incentivize kind of like heightened rents over time because you are basing your price based on like how much the other party has to lose in litigation. And so you kind of get that like compounding effect over time. Whereas with prizes, if you have like a patent buyout or something that's in the public domain and you can't license, you might have this also negative incentive of like how are we pricing this fairly and bridging the asymmetry between how much we thought this was going to be worth versus how much actual impact. So I know like impact assessment has been something that a lot of people on the team are really passionate about and this is kind of where I think it falls in maybe you need to give someone like a prize or a bounty so they have enough money to like bring it from this initial prototype to a market product but then also long-term how do you incentivize people to want to engage with that system? So maybe like a short-term prize, long-term impact assessment there's some good ways to kind of optimize there. So anyway, those are my thoughts and I would love to open it up for questions.