 on the importance of intellectual property rights for entrepreneurs. My name is Jean Bonilla and I am the Director of the Office of International Intellectual Property Enforcement in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs here at the State Department. I am your moderator for today's discussion. As we are just under one week away from President Obama's Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which takes place in Palo Alto, California, it is important to highlight the critical role that intellectual property rights plays in creating a healthy climate for entrepreneurship. Protecting intellectual property means giving peace of mind to creative thinkers who want to turn their products into profit. Entrepreneurship means economic prosperity for individuals, growth for communities, and stability for entire nations. But there's little to gain from starting a business when the core idea can be stolen by someone else. I would like to thank our impressive set of audience members for this event. We're joined on camera by attendees from Abuja, Nigeria, and Javarone Botswana. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to speak with us on this important topic. We would also like to extend a warm welcome to other audience members watching from Baghdad, Bujumbura, and from around the world. Thank you all for being with us today. We're privileged to be joined by Mr. Russell Slipher, Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, and Deputy Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Russ provides strategic leadership and oversight to one of the largest intellectual property offices in the world, and we're excited that he's able to join us for this important conversation. Russ, thank you for being with us today. Thank you. It's my pleasure to join you, and thank you for the audience and joining us. Well, did you want to say something about your past experience and your background that brings you to USPTO? I'd love to. I have an electrical engineering degree. I went to college because I had an excitement about solving problems and creating new things. And when I got out of college, I decided to join a corporation and work as a design engineer, and it was there that I first got introduced to intellectual property. I sat down with one of the attorneys at our corporation, was talking about one of the inventions that one of my colleagues and I had come up with, and we're learning about patents. And that was really my first introduction into, I guess if you want to think of it this way, a little behind the curve a couple hundred years, but it was my exposure into what our founding fathers had recognized in the late 1700s, and that is an incentive to invent by obtaining a patent on that invention provides the motivation to not only disclose your invention to others so that they can learn, but gives you that motivation to build a business and even an entire industry around it. So that was my introduction to intellectual property. And from there, I obtained a law degree and have practiced intellectual property law for the last 22 years and have been with the Patent and Trademark Office for coming on two years now. Outstanding. Well, we're very, very happy to have you with us here today. And I would like to begin today's program with several questions of my own. And they may sound very basic, but I think that particularly it's important to start the conversation this way. So I do want to start by asking you, what is IP and how does the Patent and Trademark Office define it? It's a great question. And when I first joined the Patent Office, I worked in one of our newest regional offices. And for more than 200 years, the Patent Office was in one location and we opened regional offices around our country so we could better connect with the communities across the U.S. And one thing that I did in that role was go out and meet with entrepreneurs and startups and actually the inventive and creative communities within that region and addressing this topic was usually one of the first things that we wanted to do also. Intellectual property is defined, I guess the best definition is creations of the mind. So inventions, artistic work, literary works, things that individuals think of and create with their mind, maybe symbols or names that are used in business to represent your business. So that's intellectual property. A little bit different from intellectual property is the way in which we protect intellectual property or you might hear it as IPR intellectual property rights. So there are several categories of protection for the intellectual property. One would be patents. Most people have heard of a patent. A patent is a right granted by a government that gives you exclusive rights to make, use or sell that invention for a limited period of time in exchange for your disclosure of that invention so the public as a whole can benefit not only from the product that you make but from the knowledge that went into that creation. We also have trademarks which cover a name or an image that is used in commerce to represent the origin of the product that is being presented. A third would be copyright. So copyright laws are provided to protect the artistic creations, the literary creations. So songs, poems, movies that are created, that part of intellectual property. And I'd throw one more category and that would be trade secrets. Trade secrets are intended to protect those secrets that are beneficial to the business operation. So an economic benefit to the entrepreneur or the startup or the large corporation. And this could be the recipe for the product. It could be a method of making the product. It could even be the list of your customers or your suppliers. So that in a nutshell is intellectual property and the types of rights that protect them. Well, and I asked you also how PTO protects those rights. So maybe you could elaborate a little bit on how we protect them. The Patent and Trademark Office. The United States Patent and Trademark Office. As you mentioned, one of the largest or largest in the world. We're just short of 13,000 people at our agency. And two of our primary missions are to grant patents and register trademarks. So we work very closely not only with our stakeholders or the applicants to examine their patent applications to grant a patent when it's appropriate but also we work very closely with communities both internationally and domestically to help educate on intellectual property. We register trademarks. So we receive trademark registrations for the U.S. community or to protect the trademarks in the U.S. So we examine those and then register trademarks. We also are tasked with educating or counseling the executive branch of our government in other intellectual property including copyrights, trade secrets. We work closely with other departments around government when we're working on trade issues or international training, things like that. Well, in fact, I know that both state and PTO are members of the IPR Center which is an entity that's designed to bring together those federal agencies that are specifically involved in enforcement of intellectual property. But I realize we're not really here to talk about enforcement. So let's talk specifically about entrepreneurship. You mentioned entrepreneurs and of course as we go into this next week's Global Entrepreneurship Summit why is IP important to entrepreneurs? Why should they care? Well, almost every business has intellectual property whether it's the creation of the product that they're making, it's the trademarks, the image, the brand that they're using to present their products to the world, their actual artistic creations. Intellectual property touches everybody and intellectual property rights are really a tool that's provided to the startups, to entrepreneurs to help them grow their business, to help them enter into new markets. And if we look at it from a tool to the entrepreneur just like any other tool that they may have in their business but this is a tool that helps protect their intellectual property different from their real property shall we say. How do you use those tools and are those tools effective? And there's been many studies to indicate that yes, intellectual property protection and the rights that are afforded there help grow businesses and help the entrepreneurs. A recent study by Harvard Business School in New York University found that patent approvals help startups create jobs, grow their share of the market, continue to innovate and eventually succeed in a business. In addition to that Forbes magazine in 2011 noted that the ten most valuable trademarks in the world were worth approximately $300 billion. So there are studies and proof that intellectual property does do what it's intended to do when the system works right and that is help the businesses use those tools to grow and expand and compete on a global market. And that is really phenomenally important particularly for small businesses I think that lots of times people who are the founders and purveyors of small businesses don't necessarily see intellectual property as being to their advantage. They think of it as being something that the big pharmaceutical companies are most concerned about. But it's small entrepreneurs that can benefit in a very important way from the kind of protection that you've described. So we can all see how this type of protection applies to people who develop apps, artistic creations for example. Does it also matter in other sectors? So you've given a few examples. How about some other examples of maybe those that might be a little surprising to us? Well we really just touched the surface on patents for example because when we talk about patents and it's important to mention that the intellectual property rights are really jurisdictional so they're on a country by country basis. But let's talk about the United States for a moment. We have patents that cover not just the utilitarian or function of an invention but also the design which is the ornamental design of a product. We also have plant patents that I don't think many people know about. So for asexually reproduced plants you can obtain a plant patent in the United States. On trademarks a little bit unique also. You can receive a trademark not only on the name or image that's being used but also on the sound. So if there's a unique sound associated with for example the chimes for NBC here or other sounds that are closely associated with the product or even color. So we have registrations for color marks. But really it's important because it touches every business. Every business has intellectual property. They may not recognize it. They may not have gone through the process of obtaining protection on their intellectual property but everybody has intellectual property. So again whether it's the creation of the product itself, the way that you make it, your list of customers, the list of your suppliers. All of that is intellectual property that can be protected in different ways. It touches everybody and it needs to really be thought of by every entrepreneur from every artistic. Anybody building a business. The world is a much smaller place than it ever has been. Information can travel around the globe in seconds. And so we're not just competing with the business down the street or in the next town we're competing with businesses anywhere in the world and that information will not only advance the economy in one country by disclosing that information and building an industry but it also has a benefit of helping others that you're competing with. So having the right protection, thinking through the implications of intellectual property rights for every business owner is important. Well and what can entrepreneurs do to protect their intellectual property? You've described the system in the United States. It's a strong system. It's a good system and as you point out, it's a system that has a long history. What if they live in a country with weak intellectual property protections? Well my suggestion is still the same whether it's somebody in Africa, Australia or the United States. The first thing that you want to do is take an assessment of what your intellectual property is for your business. Understand what you've created, what is protectable and then do an assessment of whether you should be protecting that. Not every intellectual property needs to be protected. This really is a strategy for each business. Where am I going to compete? Who are my competitors? Where will my product be made? Where will my product be sold? So what countries, what individuals, what kind of protection? If I was able to protect my invention with a patent, is that going to give me the best protection? Or is my business really built on my words and my creation artistically? So first take an assessment of what your intellectual property is. For example, the United States Patent and Trademark Office on our website provides an IP assessment tool to help individuals walk through that and get a better understanding of what their intellectual property knowledge is and perhaps identify areas where they could do some more research and better understand the landscape. From there I would say when you make that assessment and you determine that it would be valuable to have this protection in a particular region or in a country where, as you said, the intellectual property enforcement may not be as strong as it could be. I would still recommend getting the protection that you can in that country. The United States Patent Office along with State Department and others have done a lot of training around the world. We work closely with other countries and certainly if individuals, citizens of those countries reach out to their government and ask for stronger IP rights in conjunction with the work that we're doing, hopefully the IP landscape would improve and then that protection that they had would only become more valuable. No, I couldn't agree more. I think that the advocacy on the part of individuals who have intellectual property to protect is an essential component in convincing governments to offer the kind of IP protection that meets global standards because I think it's fair to say that we do have a standard of global protection that's really important for U.S. companies, obviously, and for those in other countries as well. What are some of the creative methods that PTO has used to make inventors aware of intellectual property and to help them protect their intellectual property? Well, it's a great question and since I've been with the PTO for two years and for the previous 20 years I worked with the Patent and Trademark Office as a customer, if you will. One of the things that really impressed me when I joined the PTO is getting a better understanding of what resources we actually provide for the inventive community, the creative community around the world and here at home. So for one example, we have a partnership with a nonprofit called InventNow and InventNow does a few things for us. They not only manage our inventors hall of fame but they also conduct a collegiate inventors competition. But the one thing that I really enjoy with InventNow is that they host camp inventions around the country and every year they reach approximately 100,000 grade school children. And have the camps in their town at their schools and they're inventors for a week. They're learning how to, not only the basics of patents and trademarks but they really, they don't even realize it but they're learning how to be creative, express themselves and work together to solve problems. And I think the one thing that I like the most, one of their classes they bring in products from home, an old sewing machine and they tear them apart and they use the parts to make something. We also have a teacher professional development program that we conduct where we're basically helping teach the teachers how to teach STEM, how to bring that collaborative inventive process to their students in their classrooms. We've got an Office of Innovation Development within the Patent and Trademark Office that is really tasked with working with the inventive community helping them understand more about intellectual property and the pro bono program that we have, for example, to help low income inventors have access to the patent system by having lawyers that work on a pro bono basis with them. We've got a global IP Academy at the agency that works with countries around the world. I think we've touched close to 5,000 people last year bringing them to the Patent and Trademark Office and providing training on intellectual property and hosting an IP boot camp. So that's just touching the surface of some of the things that we do. We have IP attachés that are stationed in embassies around the world that are helping those on the ground in the country and U.S. businesses that are doing business there. We train judges, we train legislators there. We help with IP laws and advocate for a strong global IP system. Well, and you did mention earlier your regional offices and I assume that part of the rationale for setting up those offices was in part, at least, to project some of the projects and ideas that you have put together out to other parts of the United States. I realize you're talking globally as well as domestically, but I think that's important that PTO has this domestic role as well as the global role. Working for state, we like to think of the global role first, of course, but I know that this is a very key element for educating Americans about intellectual property. The regional offices, we've got four regional offices, one in each time zone across the United States and as I said, the Patent Office was founded in 1790 and during that entire time we've been based out of the Washington, D.C. area. So the United States, of course, is a very large country with a lot of diverse communities and a lot of different types of cultures and businesses across them. So having regional offices across the country have allowed us to not only take what we create here for education and provide it in the communities that we're at, but also to tailor that for the types of industry and market that we see in that area and learn from them in a much more robust manner than we were able to with just a central office. So even though we have a lot of history behind us, we're learning how to function differently and how to serve the needs of the country better. Well, and we do work very closely with your IP Adachets and find that to be a tremendously valuable program. We're actually hoping in the not-too-distant future to assign a new intellectual property adaché to the Sub-Saharan Africa region, whose posts, of course, are represented live today. And so turning to those two posts, I would like to say that we will now take questions from our audience members in Havarone and Abuja. Please remember to speak clearly into the microphone so that we can hear you. For those of you watching from other countries, please note that you may submit questions for Mr. Slipher through the chat space at any time during this event. So starting with Abuja, do you have a question for Mr. Slipher? Thank you very much, Havarone. Some of the issues we raised are project-related. It is good to have programs reaching out to inventors and innovators and like for a country like Nigeria, we have many national associations dealing with intellectual property matters. Starting from the National Inventors Association to the Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Minds and Agriculture, and such institutions and universities. But one of the greatest problems that we face as a country is the resource, the budget to reach out to these institutions, to these associations, to these academic groups. How do you, relating to your experience, how do you source for funding, and how do you adequately attend to these programs year in, year out? Again, I want to quickly add, over the years we have had a robust relationship between the Patent and Trademarks Registry and the USP in terms of training. I attended the examiners program, the biotechnology program on the West, and my colleagues too. But of recent, that training program has kind of scaled up. What could be the problem and how can we improve the situation? Thank you. Thank you, thank you very much. That's a challenging question and I am going to ask Mr. Slifer is if he wants to address some components of that question. I think that it's good to know that you have attended some of the training programs that we've had and I think that we could in fact perhaps provide some more detail on that question after the program is over. But Russ, if you have something to say about the specific question. I would, let me address the first part of the question specifically and that is you're touching upon a problem that is not unique to any country or unique to any group. We certainly have got a lot of inventors in the United States that don't have the resources necessary to really get the representation that they need to protect their patent, their invention or obtain their patent. So what we have done at the Patent and Trademark Office have tried to tackle this in many ways. One is to create a fee structure that specifically provides reduced rates for individuals. So our starting fees to file a patent are cut in half for small entities and they're cut yet again in half so they're only 25% of the total fees for an individual inventor what we call a micro entity. So that's one way and I know that doesn't necessarily reduce the cost of obtaining a lawyer and getting that kind of counseling. So to help in that area we have expanded our pro bono program and under President Obama it was an initiative that he was driving that we would extend a pro bono program across all 50 states of the United States so that individuals that are in a challenged financial position can obtain that representation through a lawyer that's volunteering their time so the Patent Office has been investing in that and helping stand up and create that pro bono program. We also have a third program where the individuals can represent themselves in front of the Patent and Trademark Office which they have been able to do but we realize that that's a daunting task for a lot of individuals so we have created a pro se support group within the Patent and Trademark Office and the support necessary to help the individuals find their way through an administrative process that can often be somewhat challenging and complicated. So those are some ways that we in the United States have been dealing with this type of a problem recently and certainly if that's a solution that can be adopted by other agencies around the world I think that can help start to bridge that gap. What was the name of the third program that you mentioned? Pro se. So an individual representing themselves filing their own Patent or Trademark we have dedicated people in the office to help those individuals through the process. Excellent. Interesting. Thanks. Thanks very much Russ. Now let's take a question from Havarone. Havarone? Thank you very much Mine is just to say as the USPTO you grant patents and register trademarks. What do you think is the role of the entrepreneur after they've been granted a patent or a trademark because of them doing business? Excellent question. What is, I didn't quite catch. The role of the entrepreneur after he or she has received a patent do I have that correct? I believe so. Well, it's a fantastic question especially when we're talking about global entrepreneurship intellectual property and how it helps entrepreneurs and I wish I could say number one that as soon as you obtain protection for your intellectual property that the world opens up and there's no competition because it's not as I said intellectual property rights are the tools that are provided to the entrepreneur to use to help them achieve the goals that they're trying to achieve. So part of the question first off is why did you obtain a patent? When you go through that assessment we were talking about earlier you have to ask how am I going to use this patent? What does it mean to my business? Do I need it to have freedom so that nobody copies me? Am I using it as an asset that I can obtain funding from somebody? They want to see that you have protection for your intellectual property rights so we're using it kind of as collateral or to get venture capital funding into it. Are you hoping that should your business not make it, which obviously we know a lot of startups are not always successful, is this going to be an asset that you're going to have at the end that is going to be valuable and you will sell it as a way of liquidating some of your business? Is it going to benefit your business in some way? When you answer that question so would you go out and buy a very expensive truck if you didn't know how you were going to use that truck to help your landscaping business? If you're going to invest in a patent having a plan ahead of time is very important. Understanding how you're going to use it will help educate what you're going to do once you get it. Obtaining a patent isn't necessarily going to mean that your product is going to be accepted on the market or that you're going to be able to use it in litigation to drive a competitor away but it's a tool that's available if that is the strategy that you're planning to use that asset for. I don't know if that helps much but there's a lot of additional resources that are provided around agencies and the government here in the United States that help small businesses and help them understand now how do I compete in the marketplace and having the intellectual property is one of the tools that is helpful in that. Well that's actually very intriguing Russ that you say that in fact it's not always the right strategy to get trademark registration or another facet of intellectual property protection so it would be part of the self-review that you would actually undertake to decide if that in fact was what is appropriate for your specific intellectual property for your specific business. It is and I would never counsel anybody to assume that they have to get intellectual property on everything. You have to make that assessment so can you maintain the method in which you're making a product a secret so that nobody can reverse engineer it. Perhaps it would be better for your business to maintain that as a trade secret with the protections around it within your business so nobody can learn your secret instead of filing a patent application on it and disclosing it to the public. Copyrights or trademarks are things that you're releasing to the public. The trademark, the name the image that you're using to market and advertise your product is something that the public is going to see. So doing your diligence on that and protecting that would probably almost always weigh, yes it's worth the time and energy and money to obtain protection on that. A copyright case, again it's on an artistic work, it's on a creation that you're releasing to the public for their consumption and so having protection on that is important. But the difference between a patent and a trade secret is one thing. Patents are not as pointed out by our first question, they're not inexpensive to obtain so weighing the value of that is important also. Interesting. Well I want to be sure we have time for some of our other online viewers to ask questions so we do have a question from a viewer from Brazil how can US trademarks help products from outside of the US like mine? Well as I mentioned earlier intellectual property rights are on a geographic region so if our question is how can an entrepreneur in Brazil access the US market and make sure that their product that's being sold in the United States is protected then the trademarks in the United States are a very strong way for them to protect their mark in their to register for marks that would protect the origin of their products so as I said earlier each country you need to look at each country where am I going to sell my product and there's a lot of protection within the United States to enforce intellectual property rights we have a fairly strong system in the United States so obtaining a trademark in the United States to protect the product from Brazil coming in would certainly be an area to take a look at. Well I know there are international agreements too that might help coordinate some of that registration process and protection. Absolutely we have both on the trademark side and even on the patent side the ability to access using the treaty process whether it's like I said on the patent or trademark to be able to take a single registration and easily register it around the world or seek patent protection. I think that is very important we do have another question from Havarone so if you'd like to go ahead Havarone. Thank you I don't know if we are very audible this side. We can hear you just fine thank you Please go ahead please go ahead. Okay thank you very much Russell I agree with what you are saying that every business has intellectual property I agree with that but what I would like you to comment on if you can hear me is from a legal point from a legal point how do you make the distinction between how do you make distinction between IP and an idea that is inspired by existing IPR you have an existing IPR and then you have an idea that is only inspired by the form I want you to comment on that because quite often in my view there is a very thin line in terms of an idea that is being inspired by an existing one and I know that has led to a lot of litigation across the world that is one question second question I am very interested in knowing from the US point of view whether across the United States it is a criminal offence to breach an existing IPR if I am valuable thank you very much Thank you, thank you Russ over to you Well it is a very good question I mean the entire bargain if you will that our founding fathers set forth in our constitution which created the foundation for our patent system was that it promoted the progress of science and the useful arts so by obtaining the patent in exchange for the inventor disclosing to the public how they make that product what went into that invention the idea was that it would educate the rest of the public and then they would be able to be inspired by it and they would be able to create the next invention that built upon that however some inventions, some inspirations are only marginal improvements over what was protected in that patent and disclosed and others are fundamental leaps beyond it it's an area of law that I'd like to say is settled but it still not settled of how far away from that original invention do you have to be to not only be novel but be non-obvious in view of it so this is an area of law that is not easy especially in this format to really explain how far that line has to be and you're absolutely correct that sometimes that's a very fine line and it does create an issue between the patent holder that has that intellectual property right and a subsequent developer inventor how far away from that have they gotten and is there a legal dispute intellectual property rights are only as strong as the system that protects them so that means and just touching briefly on the second part of your question infringing somebody's property rights is a civil matter much like somebody trespassing on your land you could enforce it in some ways there I guess in a criminal way but it's a civil penalty of how do I get somebody off of my intellectual property rights so I can't really explain how far it has to be but that's an area of law that is grappled with that for a long time when you disclose you motivate somebody makes an improvement and how far removed from that is acceptable so excellent thank you very much now back to Abuja I think we have time for a question there yes thank you very much I have listened to I'm very pleased with the presentation I have two quick questions first and foremost I see that the U.S. system has a lot of proactive steps in terms of legislative reforms so it's a more direction some of our countries here are also trying to put some legislative reforms but the key challenge is always getting the buy-in of policy institutions as well as the legislature itself I would like to know what strategies the U.S. people and other IP related agencies in the U.S. have adopted in past to get good buy-in to legislative reforms that's one the second quick question I want to say is the issue you spoke about enhancement of user IP in businesses especially SMEs our experiences here the strategy to enhance user IP by small and medium enterprise is quite a challenge in terms of creating awareness of user IP and where there is awareness of some kind of gap in terms of the the statutory framework that is available for instance in the area of copyright which is the area I speak from the issue of getting people to understand that ideas are not ordinarily protected it's always a challenge and most of them would want to create ideas that would be protected but these ideas sometimes are not the format that would benefit from industrial production so how do we go about promoting the user IP by these small and medium enterprises thank you thank you, Abuja so which of those questions would you like to tackle first? well let's look at the first one we were talking I couldn't quite catch everything but questions about legislative reform and how we how we promulgate those new laws and build I think domestic support if I'm not mistaken how do you make sure that people understand them and want to use them well it's a difficult question again to address because we have in many years recent years we've seen a lot of legislative proposals here in the United States some have been enacted into law in fact in 2011 the American Events Act was passed here in the U.S. that created those regional offices that helped the PTO become more financially independent that also changed our structure from a first to invent to a first inventor to file system we also created a patent trial and appeal board at the patent office to help with determining the validity after a patent issues so even in the United States litigation in these areas is still I'm sorry legislation in these areas are still happening it happens to be an area as I pointed out earlier intellectual property intellectual property rights touch every industry every business within the country and so it is an area that is a very important representation across the country in other words those businesses and industries that are affected in a positive or negative way by the policies and the laws that the country have reach out to the representatives and begin that conversation of perhaps this is not a fair balanced system and it needs to be changed we see that here in the United States between different types of industries and how they use patents touches again on what I said earlier that the use of intellectual property is a tool and a strategy some industries for example in electronics industries have a lot of patents a lot of intellectual property on how to make and how circuits work and components and chemistry other industries have only a few patents that cover the fundamental product in the biotech or pharmaceutical industries and they have a different perspective on how the laws and how the courts should be looking at our laws so they work very hard with our legislators well and that kind of segues into the second question because unless I please clarify if I misunderstood your question but it sounded like what you were asking is that small and medium enterprise sometimes has difficulty in clearly defining its ideas and articulating them so that they can be in a good format to go forward with requests for intellectual property protection and I think that this is particularly relevant now as we plan to host this very large global entrepreneurship summit where small and medium enterprise and government representatives are coming from around the world to gather in California and talk about these very issues it's important to hear from all stakeholders it's important to reach all small, medium, large entities, entrepreneurs to not only provide this kind of education as we're talking about today in the introduction to intellectual property to hear from them, what are their needs how does the intellectual property system within the country work for those individuals what doesn't work for them is it too expensive, is it too difficult is it hard to understand where the protection is and how to use it there's a lot of services and information that are needed but there's also the question of does it work for you and if it's not does it work for you and for everybody well in the U.S. government I know works very closely with the world intellectual property organization to collaborate in training programs that WIPO has to try to help in the same way that you were describing the patent and trademark efforts to help people better understand and learn how they can take advantage of intellectual property I think that are a great partner for the United States is the World Intellectual Property Organization and I know they've done some tremendous work we work very closely with WIPO I know you do well let's turn back to our online viewers one asks do intellectual property rights extend to non-profit organizations excellent question absolutely non-profit organizations or for-profit organizations have very similar needs to protect their intellectual property so whether it's a university or any other nonprofit filing for your patents or protecting the market share and what you're competing regardless of how you use the revenues so yes it extends to nonprofits also you can trademark your logo absolutely well it looks like we have time for one final question which comes from our online audience when the national laws are weak in the field of intellectual property protection what can entrepreneurs do in order to advocate for the protection of their intellectual property that's a question that's near and dear to my heart Russ well I will try to do it justice but please feel free to step in the United States Patent and Trademark Office along with the State Department and many other agencies across our government work very closely with organizations like WIPO and within regions and countries to help provide that education using our global intellectual property academy GIPA to help educate but in the end it has to be a collaboration it has to be citizens and individuals working and doing business in a country speaking to their representatives when the system isn't working right form and the enforcement isn't there in collaboration with organizations like ours and countries that are working together to help improve that I absolutely agree and I think that one of the most important collaborative efforts that the State Department and the Patent and Trademark Office have is conducting the kinds of training programs that were mentioned by our colleague from Abuja where we go out and we provide that kind of professional level expertise and we learn from our overseas colleagues as well as they learning from us I know we have run out of time so I want to thank all of our audience members for your wonderful participation on today's program and a special thank you to Mr. Slifer for joining us today we're encouraged by the work that the United States Patent and Trademark Office is doing around the world to promote intellectual property rights for entrepreneurs and I want to thank you for your leadership on this critical topic we encourage you to keep up this important conversation with the leadership in your own countries the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the U.S. State Department are resources that are available to you as you seek to improve intellectual property rights and protection for your citizens we hope that you found today's conversation to be beneficial thank you again for participating and we certainly look forward to working with you in the future thank you