 Hi, I'm Keith Bergelt. I want to thank everyone for joining that was able to join today. And today we'll be talking about the management of patent risk in open source software, particularly focused on banking and financial services. I want to thank the Phinos and the LF for the opportunity to present today and to be able to talk about how Open Invention Network is working to be able to support freedom of action, freedom to operate and increase the level of comfort that banking and financial services companies in particular feel in adopting open source code and the making good choices about about innovative technologies that come out of various projects from the LF and and other organizations aware that are producing active code. I think it's probably no secret for anyone who has been active in the open source world for some time that every electronic touch that we have today is Linux and and your open source software enabled. And you even if you're utilizing a iOS platform, the even though it doesn't run on the Linux kernel, there's a significant amount of open source and Linux code that's in in that's running the iOS platform. But obviously Amazon services, Google searches and pretty much every search platform that exists is utilizing open source, the lights that we cross at the air traffic control systems that we rely on when we're flying. Every social media platform, whether it's in Asia based in Asia, or in the US is or in Europe is running on open source software, every ATM transaction that we have every mobile payments transaction in China, or wherever else in the world, we're utilizing that functionality. The autonomous driving platforms that are being developed, whether it be by Daimler, or by the Apollo platform of Baidu, or anyone else in the world, those platforms are being developed and open source Chromebooks, Android, obviously, are fundamental open source platforms that are built on top of the kernel. And so it's all around us in a way that that few people that are general consumers that are not in the industry would truly understand. While open source and Linux are not particularly well branded in products, they are nonetheless the engines, the platforms that drive innovation, and rapid cycle times and a level of inventiveness that would not be possible without the whole idea of collaborative development. I think, you know, we obviously see that over the last 15 years in particular, software has become something that everyone kind of aspires to incorporate in their products to make them more useful, more beneficial to users and to allow the products to be more functional. And very few companies five years from now will be defining themselves as hardware companies. We look at the adoption of open source companies like Kamatsu, John Deere, machining companies from Germany, Japan, elsewhere in the world, companies that make lighting equipment, companies that make video equipment, all matter of companies across the world, whether they be companies that have lived and been very much identified with hardware or companies that have grown in software are increasingly increasing the software centricity in their products. And again, no longer defining themselves by hardware, but rather by software. The nature of how this works and how the open source community works is so important to the output that we get. The modality of open source, the idea that people come together, collaborate and produce something that would otherwise not have been possible to produce a level of innovativeness and inventiveness that's otherwise not possible through siloed invention, I think is where the true power of open source is, because at some level it's a social movement. It just happens to reduce technology and code that can be used and reused by literally millions of companies around the world, million of entities around the world. But the reality is that this social movement is so impactful that it's truly transformative, because one plus one plus one doesn't equal three, it equals six or 10 or 20, when we break smart people together and allow them to engage around technical challenges. And with this, we get more diversity. We get people from all around the world. It's not race dependent or religion dependent or geographically dependent. You don't have to come to Silicon Valley as you did during the dot com era of the 90s to be able to participate in open source. You can participate in situ from wherever you find yourself in the world, and not just during COVID, but anytime. And that's part of this great melting pot of individual capabilities and competence to be able to create this new novelty that's so valuable to the products that we come to rely on, the services that we use. So what we ultimately get are higher levels of innovation. And we do it through, this isn't talked about a lot as a concept, but for me, when I think 12 years ago, I first had a conversation with Jim Zemlin about the notion of really project based innovation, project based collaboration, that projects were increasingly, in his view, going to become the foundation for innovative platforms. And so as a result, at that point, Linux was clearly the main charge of Jim Zemlin and the others at the Linux Foundation at that time. But since then, we've seen all manner of innovative projects rise up, literally hundreds of projects managed just by the LF, the networking projects like OPNV and ONAP, Open Daylight, the Virtualization Alliance, the Risk 5 Open Hardware Project, which is the Risk 5 International, which is based in Switzerland, Automotive Grade Linux, developing the digital DNA of vehicles out into the future, and not just supporting what we have in the cabin of the vehicle, but ultimately supporting all mission critical functionality on a Linux-based platform, Hyperledger, that supports the development of ledgering technology and blockchain to be able to support lower fraud in bank banking and financial services, but also many, many other applications for this, the code that's coming out of Hyperledger, the Open Container Initiative. There's so many projects that are producing incredibly significant amounts of code. And we think about Kubernetes and it's clearly one of the most significant innovations in terms of containers over the last 10 years. And so a lot of things were talked about that really in the 90s and 97 actually that really are brought to bear in the modern era of where open source is becoming so significant and proliferating at such a high rate across many, many different sectors is that the idea of co-optition, it's very much part and parcel of what open source is about. We cooperate cross-organizationally, cross-culturally, cross-geography to be able to create something different, to be able to innovate at a higher level. And then the core code that comes out of that innovation process is then available to be used and reused, adopted by anyone who chooses to do so, so long as they adhere to the rules associated with the individual licenses that the code is actually produced under. And so it's a very elegant way of partnering and collaborating that allows us to kind of get to a realization of a notion that was discussed in the 90s and really comes out of game theory, the idea that we cooperate to compete more effectively. And it's really never been more prominently featured than through the open source platforms that we currently use and through open source project collaboration. I think a lot of people look at open source and I think especially people who are new to it think that it represents some kind of departure from traditional innovation associated with associated with inventive activities and codification of those inventions. I think what we see from many, many, many companies, some of the largest patent holding companies in the world are some of the greatest participants in terms of number of projects they participate in, the amount of code that they contribute back, the amount of code that they incorporate in their products. And they also are some of the, as I said, some of the largest patent holders in the world. And so this duality that's really designed into their existence is something that I think many in new industries or segments or sectors that are just beginning to adopt open source code and understand it as a community activity. It's something that ties to opportunity, great opportunity for innovation to reduce cost and to be accelerate innovation while at the same time it also provides some obligations. And those obligations are usually around comportment, how we behave, how we utilize, how we comply with license requirements and how we create governance programs inside our companies to also how we support the use of patents, what is appropriate in terms of how patents are used. The basic concept that OIN is promulgated is that where we collaborate, where we rely on each other to produce core to where we want to be able to use and build on core code and build on each other's ideas, we shouldn't be suing each other. If we want to maintain patents that create differentiation and support innovation, and that's what, you know, there's so much diversity in the community, some companies are incredibly supportive of the patent system, some companies not, whatever flavor of approach you take, whatever predisposition you have, there is very much room for this duality of open and closed to exist and open and proprietary to exist. And so this form of practice duality is something that more and more companies are coming to and recognizing that community solutions for patent risk mitigation exist like OIN, but also there's an obligation and responsibility to be able to support kind of defending yourself through the relationships you form with multi-party entities like OIN and what you do independently, whether it's making pledges or promises of patents that you have, like Red Hat has done, dating back now almost 20 years, Microsoft is, sorry, IBM has done, dating back 15 years and many, many other companies have expressed kind of an independent leadership and a sense of responsibility to the community by articulating a pledge or promise or a mode of conduct that they're committing themselves to related to their patent portfolio. There are many different patent non-aggression initiatives, defensive patent management organizations, OIN is the first and the oldest, it's just reaching its 15th year in operation, but you have Allied Security Trust, which is an anti-troll mechanism, RPX, which largely is an anti-troll activity as well, Unified Patents, which allows poor quality patents that have already been granted to be attacked and to be invalidated. And then Latin Network, which is the newest of these entities, which started about six years ago and has actually had incredible growth and is focused on anti-privateeering to prevent companies from conveying patents to third parties and having those third parties then sue a plethora of other companies. And so that's a community that's now, I think, 1,000 members and quite significant in terms of reducing risk. These are all complementary programs for the most part. OIN established, as I said, 15 years ago in O5 with the original six companies, IBM Red Hat at that time, Novell, but now SUSE, Phillips, Sony and NEC. And then Google and Toyota joined a bit later in this decade to support projects and platforms that they are very much responsible for advancing, whether it be Chrome or Android or in the case of Toyota, Automotive Great Linux. OIN has 3300 companies that are participating in its community. They own over 3 million patents and applications worldwide that are subject to the cross-license. Our portfolio of owned patents is 1,300. These are patents that read on many different technologies and provide clearance for companies and projects as more and more open source code is adopted. And we've spent over $100 million acquiring defensive patents, some of which we've conveyed to companies or forward deployed to them to allow them to manage risk more effectively. And we've essentially served as a warehouse of patents that read on companies that had set themselves up as patent aggressors. I think it's no secret that OIN, one of the major motivating factors 15 years ago for the formation of OIN was the rhetoric and the aggressive behaviors of Microsoft as a modelithic threat. I think threat has morphed dramatically. Those of you who have been observing, we'll see that Microsoft is now a member of OIN for the last two years, almost two years to the day. It's been a participant in our community and a participant in many other communities such as Linux Foundation and others. And it's been very, very active in supporting open source and has become an entity that recognizes exactly what I described earlier, the twin elements of opportunity and obligation. And it has been working very hard with OIN on some of the projects we're involved in to reduce risk from patents as well as with GitHub and other ventures to be able to show that it is willing to and ready to meet its obligations. So OIN is really pivoting, and I'll talk more about that pivot in a little while, but as a result of Microsoft's participation and as a result of the participation and the reliance and the recognition of interdependence that so many companies, so many operating companies have formed and the connection that they now have with open source, which makes the potential of risk associated with operating companies to open source lower, but not exist not non-existent. And so we have developed a model where companies agree through the OIN cross license that where they own patents that read on core open source functionality, core Linux functionality, that they won't use those patents to sue and that they will share those patents through cross license which OIN manages. And that's essentially the Linux system and I'll talk again more about that in a little bit. Just to give you a sense of the fact that in a very purposeful way, OIN is a global organization. It is largely, if we look at the largest percentage, it's in Europe, Middle East Africa. The US is obviously very significant, but quite importantly Asia Pacific represents 22%. Actually it's a little bit more than that now, it's almost 24% of our total community membership of 3,300 companies. So as I said, Asia Pacific is at 23%, actually South and Central America at 18%, which is also very important to us to ensure that the uptake of by companies, by governments of open source in Latin America is recognized by having representation from companies from Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil, obviously, and many others. North America represents 24% and Europe, Middle East Africa 35%. We like this kind of mix and we hope that Asia Pacific and Latin America continue to rise in terms of percentage as more and more companies come to open source and come to rely on it and come to participate in open source projects. This is just a representative sample of some of the community participants from different sectors, some of the most sophisticated network telecom companies and the networking and telecom companies in the world. Rakuten and Geo are two of the most modern 5G networks to be launched. One in Geo is in India, Rakuten in Japan. AT&T, obviously a driving force behind open source adoption and technology development through its active participation and support for ONAP, OPNFV, Open Daylight and other of the networking projects the Linux Foundation manages. Some of the most significant internet companies in the world, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Huawei, these are an incredible group of companies and again some of the largest patent holding companies in the world and some of the most successful licensing companies in the world. Recognizing again that the fact that you have a licensing program and you're out utilizing your patent portfolio in that way doesn't exclude you. It doesn't create a sense of mutual exclusion from actively participating in OIN and agreeing to reduce risk by sharing patents that relate to core open source functionality. The automotive sector, automotive grade Linux has created a sea change in how companies are participating in developing technology and as I said we can expect that the increasingly platforms that on which functionality resides and applications reside for automotive use will be open source based whether it be AGL, Android for auto or otherwise. Again another group of kind of who's who of large patent holding companies but again some of the companies that I mentioned like the industrials like Caterpillar, Kamatsu and others, Johnson Controls, these are companies that you would have never expected 10 years ago even five years ago to be moving and transitioning to being increasingly software centric but clearly that's their focus. The energy sector I think LF Energy is a stake in the ground to indicate that whether it be power generation distribution, grid management that energy companies are increasingly coming to look to re-architect their networks to be able to be more efficient and effective and serve their customers more effectively. The fintech side which we'll talk more about obviously today, the two largest platforms in the world, one is managed by Ant Financial which is WeChat Pay and then or Oli Pay rather and then Tencent's WeChat Pay platform. These account for more transactions in in a day than most other countries experienced in a month and some Sumitomo Mitsuui Bank Corporation, one of the hyperbanks there are three hyperbanks in Japan, Ethereum, Blocko, Union Pay does all the clearances for the WeChat Pay and the Oli Pay transactions. Again these are massive platforms doing billions of transactions a day on mobile mobile device transactions and so it's not unusual that these kinds of companies would join OIN because it's usually the edge where you have the most innovative companies and these non-bank financial institutions are very passionate and aggressive about utilizing technology to be able to make payments easier and more secure. Ant Financial I should also mention which is a spin out of Alibaba will be going public in the near future and Ant is also the largest microlender in the world which is very significant because they are distributing capital to many countries in Africa and to India where traditional banking systems will not serve microlending needs but Ant is out there I think setting it being a trailblazer in this important area to be able to ensure that capital is available to support entrepreneurship of all of all stripes in many different parts of the world that are typically unserved in terms of capital needs. One thing that I wanted to now introduce is this the where we are kind of in financial services and banking and the what we try to do is monitor where patents are that are being used that are potentially threatening to the open source community that read on open source functionality and understand and support companies that are at risk or in litigation in financial services and across technology sectors and so over the the last year and a half we've started to see a rise in PAE so patent assertion entity these are non-practicing entities that own patents and that often acquire them from operating companies how their activities are shifting to focus more attention on open source functionality in either litigation or pre litigation assertions and and also how operating companies are becoming involved in in asserting patents and Wells Fargo, PNC, ADP these are all entities in financial services that have experienced litigation in the recent past and in the case of Wells Fargo they were sued by USAA and USAA is also sued PNC and this is not necessarily a purely open source functionality issue but it's indicative of the fact that litigation in an arena that's not that doesn't often have a lot of litigation especially since the Alice ruling which is really limited the opportunity space for patent assertion entities to sue financial services companies in particular USAA is an operating company largely an insurance that has some patents that read on the functionality related to the image capture of a of a check and then the remote deposit by electronic networks the internet and and this is a pretty broad based functionality in terms of its use and so we can expect USAA will be suing a number of other financial institutions after it moves beyond its PNC suit but it's indicative that this is a community that we can expect more activity and and more kind of squarely focused open source functionality being targeted even though this is a this is a I use this as an indicative sign of the future and it's not squarely open source related at this point what we see from intellectual ventures and sound view innovations to patent assertion entities intellectual ventures perhaps one of the best funded patent assertion entities and sound view one of the most active litigants in the market these are these are entities sound view has a series of patents that's used over the years against financial services community and beyond that read on Hadoop functionality and or claim to read on Hadoop functionality and and so you know we obviously understand that Hadoop is incredibly important to cloud providers and OIN has included it in its Linux system definition quite recently along with additional Kubernetes and Kafka functionality and and so we're very concerned about about ensuring that the patents that are held by sound view have a minimal impact on on open source choice and functionality implementation intellectual ventures has a series of patents that are claimed to read on on Hadoop on Kafka and also on Kubernetes so the this area is one that I think that we can expect you know these these significant players to be more active in and we have this early warning sign now but we can expect that companies that own blockchain patents because there are many small to medium-sized companies as well as groups of aggregators that are being formed now to try to bring together a critical mass of patents we can expect that these entities and potentially operating companies here and there that own blockchain patents can be potential patent threat nor as aggressors and be involved in actual litigation beyond just pre litigation assertion. OIN is as I described earlier is in a the middle of a pivot right now we co-founded we recognize that we were largely set up to focus on operating on operating company risk as I said this monolithic threat that existed but now Microsoft has recognized these levels of interdependency and need is a great driver toward pragmatism and and so it's behaving as I said in an exemplary fashion as a citizen of open source and we're hopeful that that continues and they understand that that's something that's measured by time not by one event or two events or ten events even but anyway with Microsoft being part of the community the OIN community and agreeing to neutralize the risk from its patents against open source as defined by the OIN Linux system definition they are actively and there are many many companies that are that are selling patents to non-praxing entities having those patents utilized as I said this is privateering and so patent assertion entities have lots of patents some of which read on open source functionality and if they have them their goal is not to use them to support products because they don't have products their activities are designed to generate a maximization of return on the investment they made in acquiring those patents so they're out suing or trying to get licenses short of short of having to sue what we are doing is recognizing that we need to be functional against PAEs and not just focus our attention on operating company risk because operating company risk is declining although still exists what we want to recognize is this reality of PAE activity and as part of this last November we entered into an agreement to co-found the open source zone that unified patents maintains to challenge open source focused patents held by patent assertion entities through IPRs as well as the collection of information and crowd sourcing to identify prior art through unified so a number of things that unified does and in doing so we partnered with Linux foundation IBM and Microsoft and I think it's very important that IBM and Microsoft came together to support this as well as the as the LF recognizing all three recognizing the importance of neutralizing non-praxianity risk and so we are funding that and supporting that together we also at OIN have an active pre issuance program it's quite likely these done these are done anonymously but it's quite likely that we're among the top five if not the highest filer of pre issuance submissions over the the last five years and what it does is allow us to reduce claims scope or encourage a patent exam or do to reject out of out of hand a poor quality patent application we look every week at new patent applications when they're published and then identify prior art from the community work with the open source community to identify prior art to make sure it's available to the patent examiner so that that he or she can can again reject or at the very least reduce the claims scope of patents that read on open source functionality in some form or fashion we also source prior art on a regular basis to provide to open source entities that are in risk or in litigation those of you who saw last year about this time there was a earlier as October of last year that a patent assertion entity called Rothschild sued Genome we started working with Genome just days after the filing and and we're fortunate to be working with a great team. Genome put together a great council relationship to be able to support the negotiation of a very effective community based settlement with no fees being exchanged and so I think that was a great win we were we provided a the content to council to be able to ensure that they could defend Genome in the most effective way possible regarding prior art and and help help to be able to be a part of the of the the the ultimate outcome but again leadership at Genome deserves a tremendous amount of credit as does external council for being able to get to the result that they got to for the community we've also forward deployed patents I use this term before we put patents in the hands of companies that were being sued by patent aggressors several years ago we sold patents to Salesforce to allow them to counterclaim and to limit the damage from patent assertion by a company that was seeking to pray upon Salesforce's lack of patents at that particular time and it's in it it's perceived inability to defend itself we allowed them to defend themselves as an equal in that that litigation and it was rapidly settled after we conveyed patents to Salesforce we also have been involved and more recently involved in the use of cipher which is an AI tool for patent portfolio analysis um that allows us to map open source patent holder uh holdings uh to see who who owns patent who owns open source related patents and uh whether that they represent what level of threat they represent uh to key projects and we do this on a project by project basis we started with Linux we then go to aglo nap and many many other projects to look at risk uh to those projects of patents held by uh non-praxing entities and operating companies the Linux system uh definition the cross license scope the way this generally works is that we uh we look at foundations like Linux foundation eclipse Apache open stack open Adam eventually which is the Chinese foundation that was announced a few months ago we look at projects that are managed under those by those those foundations or organizations and we look at the core code that's produced in releases and we evaluate that through our from a legal standpoint we look at the the the importance of it we look at the utilization of it so from a product standpoint where is it being used how is it being used uh and then we uh we include uh that that which is being used which is to deemed to be core in the Linux system definition and that helps us to develop a a patent no fly zone uh and it helps us to stay up with where where Linux and other open source projects are going and ensure that we're neutralizing risk related to those projects and this collaboration that we the collaboration that occurs in the technical side is paralleled with what happens on the legal side we work with the open source legal community on a regular basis to make sure we're up to date uh on uh on you know what should go into the what the issues are who's having problems with potential antagonists uh and make sure that we can intervene to be able to neutralize risk but also it's very important that we have this open line of communication to identify what's core open source code and then to have it evaluated by our eight member uh oan uh technical committee and then our 12 member uh technical advisory council which is made up of companies uh that are ordinary licensees that give us a broader view and help us that more effectively uh we look at uh Linux and open source projects and and these are some of the key ones that we follow and protect but there are many many others that we also protect and we look at the trajectory of these projects and when they're really producing very significant amounts of code and when uh when we need to be engaged to be able to support the protection of not patent on aggression in those areas um this just gives you an example of of the origins of some of these packages I mean the various projects that I mentioned but many others that beyond the ones that I highlighted that we're protecting uh this is kind of functionally where the packages come from there's a lot of free use in open source obviously and so common base packages represent the most significant component but over time we've moved beyond just networking and uh to include mobility we've moved beyond the enterprise to include networking security mobility cloud computing the web uh and are continuing to evolve uh the the reasons people join oin it's free so it's one of the key components there's no no cost for two anyone other than the obligation to be able to engage in the effective cross license uh that uh that we require and to practice uh non-aggression against others on code that is core uh from major projects so we we reduce risk we we we look at what's being adopted um and ensure that what's important to you as a company is what's important to us uh as I said no monetary cost we do this defensive support work that I described what we did for GNOME and we've done for many many other companies over the years and at the bottom as a bottom line and this is something that that was very resonant with with Microsoft when they approached us about signing the licenses that it's there's a sense of authenticity or litmus test with 3300 plus members uh in our community and some of the largest patent holding companies in the world as well as some of the most innovative and creative small companies in the world um the oin's participant oin participation is really a litmus test of authenticity and it's something that aids in in very many ways in being able to hire and retain the best the best talent uh that really are people want to work for authentic companies in this community they have a uh a moral compass that leads them to a place where where they want to be and where they want to work because talented people have choice and uh and I think uh you know everybody wants those uh the the talented most talented coders to be part of their team uh ultimately the only companies that don't sign the oin license and greet it to participate in the community uh are those that wish to reserve the right to sue on core Linux and open source functionality now some companies are have not joined because they're they're they want to understand the license and that's a normal process but for people who've looked at the license we've been around 15 years most people in open source where open sources has had its foundations in the enterprise and then in mobility and networking understand by now what oin is they understand it's free they understand it's a community service and they also understand that it's part of a of a set of norms that you adhere to when you're doing what's appropriate within this the social fabric of this community and so I want to thank uh again the LF and finance for my the opportunity to come in here today and to uh to speak and uh and I look forward to answering any uh any questions that uh that might exist from the uh the participant viewers seeing that there are there appear to be no questions unless I'm missing them I will uh there are there are questions what are the advantages to non-patented work how do you convince companies to not add patents to work that they are doing how does that conversation go um for companies that don't have a significant amount of money uh to be able to do a to publish a disclosure to essentially to file a patent and then they can always uh not go through with the actual registration if it gets granted for companies that that that don't have the money to kind of go through that process of actually having the patent drafted professionally and filed there are other other approaches that can be taken the key is to create patent or non-patent literature um that can serve as a source of prior art pre the the notion of defensive publications which uh IBM is probably the the leader in this by far over history um IBM produces thousands of defensive publications that it hosts on a site that's managed elsewhere uh that uh it's ip.com and that's a very uh good way because that that uh repository sits on the desktop of of patent trademark office uh examiners and so they when they do their searches patent literature is always the most important thing but then they start they look at non-pract non-patent literature as well and so that can be uh influential so it's not only um patenting is not the only way to get at this and and uh defensive publications are very inexpensive in relative terms to pursuing a patent uh program but there are many many companies now that come to us that tell us that they want to have a defensive portfolio i think red hat's a perfect example this is a company that that's pledged its patents it would never use its patents against the open source community but nonetheless it has a very significant and important portfolio to allow it to defend itself and its customers and so i think there are examples of companies that have done it that way that have had the resources to do it that way and there are examples of companies that that will publish uh through defensive publication means it's essentially a patent the summary of an invention without any patent claims and that's what a it's a much briefer briefer document but again it serves as a statement of prior art as well any other questions okay well thank you very much it's uh been a pleasure to be here with you today and i appreciate the your time and attention in uh in attending the session bye now