 All right, thanks. My name's Jordan Wallbesser. I'm talking about optimizing software patents. Here's some information if you want to contact me. This is either going to be something that tests Dan Giganti's nap. He may go to one in a second, but we'll find out. And this is an interesting topic to me. Here's the problem. Patents come actually from the Constitution. They're there to promote the progress of science, of useful arts, and they're secured for a limited time to authors and inventors. Now, recently, we've been having a lot of talk about software patents. And a lot of it in the media is negative. And I think the problem is that the media and our peers, we sort of accepted the fact that software patents are broken, the system isn't working, and it's just some dusty artifact. But that's really not the case. Here's someone that made some statements similar to this. Thomas Jefferson, who happened to be our first director of the US Patent Office, started hating patents. They thought they were an embarrassment by the time they finished, he thought they were a fantastic idea. So what changed there? Patents really are an exchange between an inventor and the public. The idea is an exchange for a monopoly for a limited amount of time. The inventor has to disclose what they've come up with and agree to release that into the public domain. So before patents, we had guilds. We had secretive industries. If you were a glassblower in Murano and you wanted to leave and sell elsewhere, you might get your hands chopped off, you might get assassinated. It was bad. Afterwards, in 2012, we've had half a million patent applications filed. So that's a lot of information getting to the public. Here's some of those things that did get to the public. Practical things. Page rank. The chemical formulas for Lipitor. Multi-touch. These aren't just abstract ideas. These are things that are important and that we use. So this page rank patent, which is in what makes Google work, it ends in 2018, but it's available to us now. And we can learn from that. Yahoo can learn from that. Microsoft can learn from that. And we can design around from that. And that's what pushes innovations in the patent system. So the practical effects are if you were to stop offering patents at all, people would be less likely to disclose this information. We'd have more trade secrets. We'd have more of this secret sauce where no one tells why things work. Here's your 15-second breakdown of patent law. It's governed by Title 35 of the US Code. If you want to change patent law, change this. Three key sections. One of one, it's anything that is made, a method or a composition of matter. One of two, it has to be new. One of three, it has to be obvious. I know this by heart. Understanding the law, prior becomes more searchable now. So it should be harder and more difficult to get a patent because everything that's already out there. So the trick is, can you prove to someone that your invention isn't obvious? Jumping to software patents, the truth is there's no such thing as a software patent. Software patents are no different than hardware. They're no different than chemical patents. People that say software patents are evil, well, they're really saying that all patents are evil. So the patent office has said, you can't patent math. And that's understood, and at the beginning they resisted patenting software. The courts disagreed because it's a hard line to draw. Everything is just math when you think about it. And math is hard. This graph which came out completely indecipherable talks about how much money is spent per year and it's in the billions for software. That's at the very top. And pharmaceuticals and some of those things are even lower. So the courts struggle with this. What exactly is a software patent? Courts aren't good at making laws. That's not what they do. They're good at resolving conflicts. And likewise, these patent attorneys who are engineers will find good ways to sort of overcome these court decisions, different ways to write patents to get something. This in part has resulted in patent trolls. And like it or not, patent trolls are a classic American success story. Patent trolls talk about buying low and selling high. So stopping trolls isn't about getting rid of patents. It's making it more expensive for them to do what they do. Because of this thing, the Constitution, we can't just make it illegal to sell patents and we can't invalidate patents based on who owns them. That's just one of these annoying law things that we have to deal with. So there's also good patent trolls in a way universities don't practice, they don't make anything. And we need more of those. I mean, remember PageRank? PageRank is owned by Stanford. It was licensed to this company called Google for 1.8 million shares. And they ended up making something like a quarter of a third of a billion dollars off of this and that was reinvested into other projects. So we need to be creative about how we optimize. Maybe we have different licensing schemes. Maybe we have something where the loser pays. There's plenty of different options. We just need to be creative about it. So lastly, patents work. These problems aren't too hard to solve and we need to address the issue and not dismiss it. So again, my name's Jordan. If you have any questions, find me. I'll be in back. Thank you, Jordan.