 And this morning's speech will be Deb Nicholson with Software Patents, Trolls and other noise. Please welcome Deb Nicholson. Thank you. So I am going to talk a little bit about trolls, but I'm also going to try and make it fun, which is a bit of a challenge because it's sort of a depressing topic. Are there lawyers in the room? I'm just curious. Okay. Oh, just one. Okay. Great. And this is not legal advice, obviously. Also, if you want to ask a question at the end about your friend's company that's in an ongoing lawsuit, we are being recorded. So probably you don't want to do that unless your counsel is here and told you it's okay. So that a little bit out of the way. I'm going to kind of quickly go over where we're at and we'll talk about what's going on globally and how those things are all interrelated. And then we'll look at some things that we can do to sort of address the problems. And I know that at some point you're going to be like, can't we just go blow something up? Is there like a death star somewhere or whatever? Hold those questions to the end. If I use a term or a legal concept that you don't understand, go ahead and ask the quick ones as we go so that everyone knows what we're talking about, but save the death star plan for the end. So 300,000 patents, software utility patents were added to the U.S. pile last year. For some reason I have this, I don't know if folks are here for the other talk on the imperfect penguin, but this would be one of those. I think what I had written here was I got 99 problems but a patent ate one. But I guess I didn't save it. Which is how do you get 300,000 patents, right? It's not 300,000 inventions. It's 300,000 problems that someone's identified and said, I will fix that. Oh, it's not technical. It might be a pep cat, who knows. Or a library office. I'm willing to split the difference. But it's not 300,000 new things that are being made. It's not 300,000 new solutions. It's 300,000 new problems that have been identified that someone thinks they could fix with software or maybe some mix of software and hardware. But they haven't actually done it yet in most cases. They've gone down to legal department and said, hey, the head of my boss in engineering said, if I came down here, you guys were offering money for patents and stuff. I had this dream at lunch when I was supposed to be awake or whatever. And I thought maybe you guys could patent it from legal department. So it's like, you thought of a problem, but it doesn't necessarily represent a solution. So with all of those patents, this is, you can kind of see, I think, exponential is the math word we're looking for here. These are utility patents issued over time. Oh, that's where I put that one. Sorry about that. So the functional claiming, which we talked about a little bit, and that's where all those patents are coming from. Lots of patents means lots of lawsuits, which is unfortunate. So trolls, I guess they probably have a code of conduct at their conference where they ask everyone not to call them trolls. So all of the nice scholarly work on trolls refers to them as NPEs, or non-practicing entities. So this is a number from Besse Mar as of 2011, annual wealth loss. And this is a combination of diverted attention, diverted staff time, missed market opportunities. You can read the whole paper if you want to look at the details on that one. And again, that number is going like that. So the other thing that's interesting to note about patent trolls is that they're increasingly targeting users and adopters and not the makers of the software. So they go after the customer because the customer is like, I have no idea if the software is infringing on a patent. So I guess you could have the money as long as you don't want more than it's going to cost us to get our lawyer in here and figure out what you're talking about. So we're starting to see this tactic used more and more of the time where they're going after not the person who's making the software and understands what the infringement might be, alleged infringement might be, but are just going to pay because it's going to be more expensive for them not to. So is this just a U.S. problem? This is like usually when I come outside, you know, I leave the U.S. and people want to know like, why are you guys so nuts? What is going on over there? And then when I figure out they're not talking about Justin Bieber but software patents, I'm sorry, I don't really have any answers. But I found out that we're not entirely alone, we're just apparently leading on this particular issue. So these are, this is from Lens.org, and I didn't differentiate them into different types of software patents. But software patents and software related patents from Lens.org, they've aggregated databases from patent offices all over the world. And these are sort of the top five. So USA, there we are, raw. Australia, our neighbors today to the west, right? The European Patent Office. And then also not so far from us considering, because I'm on the other hemisphere, China and Japan. And in fact China really kind of took through this whole software patenting thing. Patenting in China went up 32%. And that's, I think that's another one or if we had the more recent numbers it would continue up, up, up. So more patents, more trolls, unfortunately. I know he looks really angry, I feel like he'd be a great lawyer one day. What we found is that trolls are bringing about 11% of the UK suits that are software related. I'm sorry, they may or may not be software related, but we expect that a large chunk of those are software. And we've got trolls operating in other parts of Europe. There's only a limited amount of data on this because they don't really want the flashy headlines in the NPR spots or whatever the equivalent of it, I guess it'd be a BBC spot, right? So they've been doing more of the like low ball letters. Like don't tell anyone you got this letter, send the money over here, and no one gets hurt. I mean, no one goes to court. So we know that trolls are active in Europe. And this paper actually has the most data I was able to find on this topic. So this was last year. There's a lot of numbers on Italy and Germany specific in there. And I'll give you guys a list of reading for fun at the end. So the other thing that we know about software patents globally is that foreign inventors are really successful in the US courts. Like more successful than US inventors when they go and bring a patent suit in our courts. There's no one as exactly certain why that is, but I think it might be the accents. Fans of Benedict Cumberbatch might know what I'm talking about. I haven't sat on a jury with him, but I wish. Anyway, so we know that foreign inventors are using the US courts to get money out of their competitors or just people that can have money. We know that trolls are active in Europe. We know that they are trying to stay below the radar. And we know that the troll business model is really lucrative. Like really lucrative. And what you might hope, like the folks in this room, I feel like when I said, hey, so a bunch of folks that bought pieces of paper going after software developers and trying to shake their money out of them. And you'd be like, ew, that's gross. What we ended up having happen in the patent monetization area was that a lot of practicing entities said, hey, you just took a bunch of candy from a baby. Where are the daycares? Because I would like candy. So we've been seeing more and more practicing entities exhibiting troll-like behavior. Some practicing entities have been selling their patents to subsidiaries. Most notably, Microsoft and Nokia sold about 2,000 patents to an entity called Mossade, very catchy, right? For about 100 bucks a pop. And then they're going to take a little chunk of percentage of money off the top for cross-licensing requests. Mossade is incorporated in East Texas, a tech hub if there ever was one. And Luxembourg, which I haven't told, is kind of like the Delaware of Europe. It's sort of fast and loose within corporation. And then Ottawa. And I don't profess to know what's going on in Canada. So they've been sending cross-licensing requests. And because Mossade isn't a practice entity, they're like a subsidiary, they don't have to adhere to the fear of non-discriminatory doctrine. So they aren't a company selling stuff. They're a troll arm of a practicing entity. So that's worrisome. The other thing that we've seen is schools, full of smart people with fresh ideas, but not so full of money. And you really can't touch the chancellor's salary. So they feel like they could use some more money. So we've been seeing companies forming relationships with universities. Intellectual ventures, people have heard of intellectual ventures, yes, has 300 such relationships. Maybe more that we're not on paper. And so in addition to this creating a factory of new patents for intellectual ventures, which is already disturbing enough, it's also at the same time inculcating students into this idea that patents are not a temporary step from having people steal your ideas. They are a monetization tactic. So you invent, you don't have to go take it to market. Why do all of that work when you could just use it as a stick to beat people with? So I find that worrisome. So, processing entities or trolls, it really doesn't matter because that person in the back is still you, regardless of who has sent the letter. And this is, yep, I don't know what happened there. Anyway, we'll see that one later. So at this point you might be wondering if there is any good news, right? There is, there is. We're going to go on to the good news next. So I'm pretty excited to be here in New Zealand because New Zealand is one of the countries that managed to actually put strict limits on patentability and eliminate most software patents, at least most of the egregious ones that are purely software and no other stuff. So I, and I'm not from here, you might have noticed with the accent, but there may still be a lot of software and hardware combination patents on the books in New Zealand. But I did want to say congratulations. That's what the balloons were for. So that is awesome. And I'm, we, I met someone who worked on the bill who's here, Daniel. Yep, hi. Thank you so much. So that's like, that's fantastic because, you know, in the US we were talking about legislation, which actually wasn't even going to abolish software patents. It was just going to sort of ameliorate the effect of non-practicing entities on practicing entities. And so in 2013 that passed the House, but not the Senate. We have a bicameral body as well. And we just got a new crop of folks who seem not so interested in technology. I don't want to get into other politics, but I don't really think we're going to be seeing the software patent topic addressed is what I think. At least not at the federal level. What we have been seeing, transparency at the state level. And so here are a couple of states that have managed to sign something into law saying, you know, bad faith patent suits are not okay. So if you send a letter and you don't expressly say what you think is infringing and you don't mention the patent that you have and you're sending basically like the same letter to say 50 different plaintiffs, these states have decided to pass legislation to make that not okay. So that's progress. It's not all of them, obviously. It's not Texas. You might have noticed. But it's some. So that's, you know, we're a little bigger than New Zealand. So it's a little more work to get consensus on these topics. We did have some good news from the Supreme Court in the U.S. in last year. So this is the Alice versus C.L.S. bank case. Did people read about that? Or I don't know if people read about the American court stuff outside of the U.S. A little bit maybe for this. Okay. So this one is, it's a case about like two parties using a third party to manage their financial transactions for them. Like basically like, I imagine like, you know, cave people being like, oh yeah, so, you know, Ugo and Muggo like asking Sluggo to like kind of, can you hang on to all the dinosaur meat and give it to me once so and so makes me a new net, right, whatever, something like that. So using a third party to manage your financial relationship with someone else that is, you know, you're not just, you're not just waiting on the person that owes you money to tell you how much money they owe you, kind of a thing. Anyway, so this is like a kind of thing that's been doing, I imagine it's been happening forever, but the C.L.S. bank patent says we're doing it like on a computer and we're going to call it electronic escrow. And so this kind of winded its way through the courts and the Supreme Court said, no, you can't just take like a simple financial transaction and stick it on a computer. Like, hooray, finally, someone is able to say that. And this is great because the Supreme Court gives their opinion and then the lower courts are supposed to abide by it. So that means that cases that come along afterwards are supposed to do what the Supreme Court has told them is the right thing to do in this case. We had another case, we're Nautilus and Bioseg and this is, it's like a heart monitor kind of a thing. And the company with the patent didn't want to say like hand size because that would be obvious. So instead they described it really vaguely, like what they, you know, but they meant a hand-sized thing that you used with your hand. And, you know, and I'm paraphrasing wildly if you want to go deep on these and you care about heart monitors and hand-sized monitor things, like you should go deep on it. But the Supreme Court said basically super vague patents, also not enforceable, which is great. It's kind of sad that it took until 2014 to say that, but you know, we take what we can get. So, and then this was a case that the Supreme Court decided not to take. So Sovereign is a company, they used to be a practicing entity or a more practicing entity. They have some shopping cart patents and shopping cart technology patents, like, you know, for checking out. And Newegg sells stuff online and they have a shopping cart, a virtual shopping cart. So Sovereign sent Newegg a note and Newegg has, they don't, they don't truck with software patent trolls or requests like this. So they said, no, we're not going to, we're going to fight you on this. And so that one ended up like it went to East Texas. Hmm, that shopping cart technology sure does sound fancy. So yes, you can, you can keep that. But then they appealed it and the federal circuit is like, this is super obvious subject matter. Like, why are you wasting our time? So Sovereign tried to get the Supreme Court to overturn that and they were like, no, we're down with this being super obvious subject matter and you don't get your money. So this is a quote from the president of Sovereign. As the kids say. So, so the upside there is that the lower courts finally have some tools. They can actually go ahead and say, this is a big pile of junk. No. If you look at court cases over time in the US, for many years it seemed like the courts were unwilling to kind of throw the US Patent Office under the bus and be like, I don't know what you guys are smoking over there, but like we're not having it. So they were just kind of like, okay, I guess. So having the upper courts give the lower courts like kind of free reign. Go ahead and say you think this is bogus. You think this one's about nothing. You think this one is basically something we all know how to do, comma on a computer. You can toss those out now, which is awesome. So this was from June of this year. Digitech, they provide some data that allows digital images to be displayed on different devices. That was the patent that they have. Yeah, I know. I mean, you know, like I'm giving you the little blurb. The actual patent is probably dense and impenetrable reading, but they basically like sued everyone that's got a screen or a scanner or anything involved in their business. So that went to the federal circuit and they were like, no, no, the Supreme Court told us that we can say, no, take that stuff and go home, which is awesome. Of course, you know, it's not a abolishing software patent story. But you know, again, like I say, we take what we can get. One other thing that is interesting is that, and these folks wrote a whole paper on this, more experience with patent suits makes judges less likely to rule the patent holder. So like the first one they get, they're like, wow, you guys invented the internet. That's amazing. Okay, sure. I can't believe you stole the internet from them. Give them money. And then the second one, they're like, wait a second, I met the person who invented the internet last month. So no, you told me once. So the more software patent suits that judges hear, the less likely they are to rule for the patent holder. So that's good news. Of course, getting sued still sucks even if you win because, again, it's this huge pile of money and time and attention and energy, things that you could really use to do any other thing at all with. The other thing, judges getting a little bit more savvy, jury's not so much, unfortunately. The reason that people really like to, or that patent holders really like to go to East Texas is because it's mostly like kind of farming community. So they get like kind of older folks like, I don't know what the jury, like do you guys have jury duty here in New Zealand? And then do you try to get out of it because you have a job? Yeah, okay. I got called once actually in the U.S. and it was actually for a patent case. It was a couple years ago. And it was like two lipo section companies, one from the U.S. and one from Germany. And they were like, yeah. So we're basically in India all day every day for two or possibly three. I mean, aren't there any lipo section wanting people to go around? I don't know. And so I told them, I'm like, well, I think most of that like IP law is kind of bull, like all that one click, like pfff. And they're like, yeah. Okay, you can go home. So, but in Texas, you know, like you're retired, you're like, oh, I get to sit in the air conditioning and they buy me lunch. It's pretty awesome. So, you know, these are the folks that are hearing the cases in East Texas, which makes them really, really appealing for patent holders. So the judge is getting more savvy. We've also seen a rise in the number of cases that juries hear versus judges. So it used to be you would almost never have a jury hear a patent case. And now it's like 70% of patent cases get heard by juries. So, so what can we do? That's the, right? That's what everyone wants to know. So we know, we know that predators are out there. We know that ignoring predators doesn't usually stop them. So I feel like I should have probably gotten an ostrich for this one, right? Like, so, but just for here. Could follow New Zealand's lead, which would be fantastic. I'd love to see that. Of course, we don't all live in the shire. And even if you're here in New Zealand, you may occasionally leave New Zealand or send your software outside. How many people have software that you think is used by folks in the U.S.? Yup, so, yeah, about a third to, yeah, a half there. So, yeah, so standing is one of those things, like you only need a couple folks using your software in the U.S. to have standing in the U.S. courts. Which, again, I'm sorry about that, but it's way above my pay grade to fix that. So, so what do you do when you go and you have to interact with other jurisdictions? I work at the Open Invention Network. We run a defensive patent pool for free software, Linux, Android, GNU, and a ton of other free and open source software. And we've got folks that have signed a mutual non-aggression pact. So a lot of, like, the big companies are in there. Red Hat, IBM, Google, Canonical, but also a lot of, like, small one-person distros. And so everyone signs an agreement saying we won't see each other. And it's like, okay, that's great. What else happens there is that they class-license all the patents they have mutually to each other. So if you have no patents, you sign up for the OIN, and then you get sued, you have a whole pile of patents to use for defense, which is exciting. I'm not going to go on and on. I don't want it to be like a sales pitch for OIN, but I can talk to you about that more later. Another thing that you could get involved with is patent busting. So I run into a lot of folks that are like, ah, so patents, they suck, and I don't want one. I'm like, yeah, okay, great. But I don't want anyone else to have a patent on the thing that I'm making. And they're like, yeah, okay. So we have a, there's a couple ways to do that. You can submit prior art or look coming down the pike and block them if you have prior art. So we organized a nice offender site, but EFF has trolling effects, and patents.stack exchange is another slice of looking at technology patents. So doing some patent busting or doing a defensive publication, you're like, hey, I made this, please don't give the patent to someone else. And then you don't have a patent, you haven't contributed to the total number of patents in the world, but you hopefully will not have someone patent your stuff while you're making it. So a couple of strategic reforms. This is what we were talking about when we were talking about legislation. You know, companies with more broken democracies than New Zealand apparently, which I think definitely qualifies. I'm not going to call anyone else out. I definitely don't know enough about Australia to throw you under the bus with that as well. But, you know, complete transparency for when suits are brought. So the statewide piece of legislation where it's like you have to disclose the real person or party in interest that's bringing the suit. You have to actually say what patent is being infringed. You have to say what technology the person you're sending a letter to is using that is infringing on your patent, allegedly. That would get rid of a lot of the lowest level of trolls or bad actors that are just like, well, you know, we print up like 300 letters a day and just send them out and see what happens. So this would kind of go to some of that. It doesn't go to the anti-competitive suits where, you know, large companies are trying to get their smaller, up-and-coming, more agile, free software competitor out of the way. It doesn't go to that, right? Shorter life spans for software patents, if you can't get rid of them all together. I don't know if this... People like to talk about this as one that academics really find appealing. In the U.S., we're sort of afraid that if we talked about shorter life spans for software patents, that what would happen is Farmer would be like, you know what, we feel like our span for patents is also not quite correct. And what Farmer would push for is a longer span. So people who kind of look at patents generally are a little reluctant to kind of break them up. But, you know, it can't be... It can't escape anyone's attention that software moves a little faster than 20 years. So, eliminating functional claiming by requiring less fuzziness. Fuzziness is not the legal term there, but in some particular spheres of innovation, you have to be more specific about, you know, you have to actually just write a better description of what you're trying to patent, which is... I know that seems like a weird thing to actually have to be like, could you guys like do your job? Like, it would be nice... Like, just say what you mean. And that also kind of includes like the sphere of saying like, what's not covered by your patent. So that's, you know, your jurisdiction does this. We financially incentivize our patent office, which is really, really weird. So the USPTO has... They get fees for when patents are applied for, but then they get another bit of money when they actually issue a patent. So it's kind of, I mean, they're kind of like working on commission, which means that they assume a patent application is good until they can find a reason that it's not, which is really weird. But that's kind of where we're at in the US, which is unfortunate. There are other problems with the USPTO as well. We also give them a very short amount of time to look at each patent, and yeah, anyway. So there's a lot of problems there. But those are some of the things I think that would get rid of some of the worst problems if you do not have a jurisdiction where you think you could abolish patents altogether, first offer. So, I cannot see into the future. There's a little shout out for our friends at LCA. So we're doing a little steampunk thing later, right? So I don't really know what's going to happen. The courts are all like, you know, they can kind of decide whatever they want to do. I also, I didn't mention the transfer thing. So that's like... No, it's a... Obviously that's bad. If you can figure out who to go tell, that would be great. Yeah, right, right, no. And in the US, the Free Software Foundation is working on that too, and I'm sure they're not alone. And open source. Open source industries, Australia? Yeah. Fantastic. Ecology.org. Awesome, okay. Ecology? Knowledge Ecology. Knowledge Ecology, okay. So, yeah. So, obviously having the, like, while folks who are interested in seeing everything patented all the time are having their secret meetings, maybe we could chat and I receive about it and see what we could do globally to keep that from happening. So, yeah. So, global coordination. Being aware of when you leave your jurisdiction and your nice, warm, patent-free zone that there are some ways to protect yourself. If you have time and interest and you like to stick it to people who are going after overly broad patents doing some patent busting. So, those are all good activities. As I promised for your reading pleasure, I'm getting the part where in a minute I'm going to ask you if you guys have questions and I can tell people have been thinking about it. So, I'd definitely like to hear those in a sec. These are a couple of papers. If you do like this topic or at least, you know, or maybe some days you feel too hopeful and optimistic and you want to kind of bring it down a notch. There are some things you can read. The one about how the judges and juries have been changing in the last decade or so is the third one down, Modern Patent Litigation, Alison Lemley and Schwartz. The Patent Assertion and the Star of Innovation, Cullington does a fantastic job of writing about this like a regular person and not either a lawyer or an academic. No offense to the lawyers in the room. And then the second one is the one I mentioned. It talks about patent trolls outside of the U.S. And this is the only paper I've found that has any data on that at all. And finally, if you want to read about how judges have become sick of hearing from software patent trolls, there's a paper for you there. So maybe that one's kind of hopeful, I don't know. Anyway, I have picture credits and I'll have time for questions. So I would love to hear from you guys if you have questions. Yeah. Oh, someone's supposed to run over to you, I think. When doing shout-outs earlier, I failed to recognize the back of Brenda Wallace's head. Shout-out to Brenda. Oh, shout-out to Brenda. Okay, cool. So I have to add to what you said at the beginning. I have like 20 patents. And I apologize, they're hardware patents, but it's the same thing, right? They're not caused by people having taking their dreams down to legal. They send legal up to sit behind you while you're working and dangle buckets of cash. Okay. Now that we know it's it. We're blaming it on legal. We're blaming it on legal. Okay. You've got to get on those guys. If you're a programmer, they have their own programming language they write patents in. It's different from English. So, but what I really wanted to talk about was the, I have a great friend who, and he's genuinely a friend, it's not me, who builds underwater robots. And he discovered to his horror that someone had patented his previous product. And he didn't have the money to patent it because he wasn't the larger well company to patent at his stuff. And he now is out of business. And he was really in a... That would have been a great place for a defensive publication. Yeah, well, he was lucky in that they quoted his publications in the patent application. Lucky. I don't know if that's the right... I'm not sure lucky means what you think it means. Yeah, well, it isn't because he didn't have the money to follow other than write them a strongly worded letter because he's a little guy and he's left the country, left the country, left New Zealand because he went off and did other stuff. And there is a real monetary imbalance between the people who are doing all the patenting and the guy with the broad idea. And I don't know how to solve that. Yeah. Follow on to that. One of the key arguments that succeeded in getting where we did in New Zealand was that very argument in representing Catalyst's argument. I brought up how much it cost Borg to fight a patent. And we can be full-time patent fighters where we can innovate and stimulate the economy. And that argument had a lot of traction. That's excellent. Do you have a website that you would refer folks from other places to look at your work and... Thank you, Dave. All right. Fantastic. I just wanted to add I guess to what Paul was saying there because I found it obviously these things exist but I just found it really quite interesting when I found out the incentives that large software companies give people for creating patents. For example, in Microsoft if you get a patent in Microsoft and you get a cash bonus, not only will you get a cash bonus you'll actually get a little award thing. So you can go into people's offices in Redmond and these guys have 20, 30 of these awards all stacked up. They have no idea what any of these patents are for or anything like that. It's just purely a financial incentive and it's really... I don't know, I just found that because I know that exists but yeah, when you're talking about they're really interesting and as I said if you speak to these people they have no idea what the patents are most of them or what they're ever used for it's just the hoarding of... Yeah, no. That happens on the free and open source side too. That was the other interesting thing when I was at a particular open source company when they were talking about a new person that was coming into a team they were quite proud to mention how many patents they had in the mobile technology arena which for me was like So the question I have for you is it too late for the US? Is it worth even worrying about the US and just everybody that is doing anything interesting with technology just leaves because the US is doing that to themselves already aren't they effectively saying that we really don't want to do business with the rest of the world? Is it too late for the US? Oh gosh So then in a lot of different ways Yeah Well No, so I think I think at the state level we're seeing a lot of reform and the way that we got reform in the US is that you get a couple of states and you're like, whoa look this guy didn't fall money didn't magically disappeared on a whole and they seem to be doing okay so then you can kind of be like we've got 30 states working on this one you know they're still doing business and it's okay and then you can get stuff up to the state level so it's a little bit like a process of course that's totally the folks who pass those pieces of legislation at the state level are totally separate from the people who go to these international trade agreement meetings I have no idea who those people are and for those meetings I would let you guys know if I did So yeah I think they're really trying to have it not a giant public conversation where we're like what would actually make sense maybe we should talk to the people who are actually affected and see what folks in the industry really think and it's like or we could just have a super quiet meeting like at a golf course at an undisclosed location and just decide what we should do so is there potential for the US to change its tune I think it would take a while and I think it's going to be I think it would have to yet yeah I don't know I mean it's like I think probably like one layer away from understanding like how technology works like politicians look at that and like in broad strokes they're like well we've got Apple and Microsoft so like we should be good right you know and which is right in this room it sounds ridiculous right yeah yeah I don't know like I said I can't see the future but I don't see federal legislation abolishing software patents happening in the US like in the next couple years we have like way deeper problems with our current Congress actually but so I think it will be a while but which is why I talked about some of the things that you could do in the meantime to sort of ameliorate the impact and kind of keep from like getting your shirt in your pants maybe just losing your shirt I don't know or if you fight eventually what happens is you stop getting letters they're like oh man they always fight back so I think like New Egg might have kind of hit that place where they're like oh don't even bother you know so it depends but it costs money like you know I work on a little GNU project called Media Goblin and it's like you know a handful of us like two paid people but if we got a letter like we wouldn't be able to play it like New Egg does so again it's the uneven it's the imbalance of power so you spoke about how there have been advances in courts having more leeway and higher courts having decided that certain kinds of software patents are inaccessible and it will probably invalidate it much more quickly however because getting sued still costs money and having to appeal out of an east Texas court costs even more money do you do you know anything about what kind of advances have there been in terms of well one reducing jurisdiction shopping because if you get sued in east Texas it doesn't matter that the higher court is already invalidated you're going to have to be you're going to appeal to a district court anyway and secondly getting the USPTO to maybe stop issuing patents that get invalidated by Supreme Court rulings yeah okay so the two questions there could we reduce the foreign shopping and could we get the USPTO to stop issuing really crappy patents what's been happening in that area so there are a lot of folks having conversations about the forum shopping unfortunately it's kind of like any other sort of entrenched hierarchical bureaucratic thing where it's like you know like folks get out of law school and for a couple years they're like we should change this and make it great and like more public defenders and like you know stop discovery of use and everything and this and that and like forum shopping is an evil and you know and then like kind of you get up to the top and they're like oh I have this whole office I run from east Texas and everyone thinks I'm fantastic because I've basically made my entire town rich so I'm not interested so it's that imbalance of power like the folks with the best ideas and the most altruistic approach don't have the most power I don't know of any legislation that's been filed specifically about the forum shopping but it's a known problem and it is being discussed as far as getting the USPTO to change like how they issue stuff the only thing that's happened on that is that the America Invents Act tried to kind of go into what's going on at the USPTO and how they run themselves and again that's like it's an office with like you know somebody who's been in politics forever at the top and then kind of all these like overworked underpaid government employees at the bottom that might be like oh well I have a hot second between like the 17 software patents on my desk for approval today like this isn't working if you have like two minutes I'd love to talk to you about it kind of thing so there are some conversations happening to talk about some specific to the software area like so business method patents they changed recently where they must have another pair of eyes and it's government energies so they like call it A P E or whatever or APOE right which just means after you've been staring at this very awful language in a patent for however many hours you take it down to the hall of your colleague and you're like is this a thing I can't even tell anymore so they do that for business method patents and then the other one is I think it's bioinformatics patents where you have to say like what's actually covered and what's not covered because you could end up patenting parts of people I guess or something like that so they want to be sure that you're saying like just so you know I'm not actually patenting eyes we're just patting a thing that goes with eyes right okay so there are some examples from other areas where you know industry specific measures to do something about patent quality are have been floated and so that's a way that we could go into the USPTO and try and push for that and that's another conversation that's like kind of at the dynamic level right now I guess largely there could be other meetings I don't get invited to I don't know but yeah so that's kind of the glass of it I don't have anything super specific that you can know and you can call up and be like yes do more of that so we have time for one more question okay one more thanks Deb the writing the incentive system using companies I think that's one of the core problems in the industry is the massive incentives that companies offer to the employees to create patents and it's not just financial incentives it can be a requirement to go up a certain level in the hierarchy it's very common that means all the senior people have patents and thus are happy with the idea so I think we need to use the incentive system to combat the patent system I tried to introduce this in a big company I worked at previously where the idea was that creating patent defense materials should provide the same level of points towards your career and provide the same financial incentives so taking out other companies competitors patents should be rewarded within the internal companies patent system I didn't manage to get it up in that company but you know maybe give an idea for other people to try within theirs because I think it would be a that's a nice idea there are a lot of ways you can argue that and in fact you got a fair bit of traction within the company I was within the idea but it didn't end up succeeding but there are some arguments you can put forward advantages for the company of incentivizing patent defense materials within the company and if that can gain traction across the industry then we could see the incentive system being used to reduce the problem yeah that would be I'd love to see that and we would oh and would be happy to help with that but you know in our space the hardware folks will have to figure out their own person to have help them with it but I'd love to see that in our space thank you guys so much