Good morning, everyone. Are we up and running? Do we have the webcast up and running? Are we good? All right. Welcome. Thank you for joining us at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this morning. So great to have all of you here. And welcome also to those of us joining us online. So we are webcasting the whole morning for anyone who wasn't able to join us here today. My name is Kate Darling. I'm the IP Policy Advisor to MIT's Media Lab. And I'm very excited to be standing here today because this gathering is the official launch of a project that has been years in the making, the Prior Art Archive. And when I look around the room, I see people from quite a diverse set of institutions. I see lawyers. I see representatives from industry, from government, from academia, from the startup world. And what unites us all here today is the belief that we can make the patent system better. And that prior art and access to prior art is a crucial component of a well-functioning patent system. And that this information should be available to patent examiners but also to everyone else. So as many of you know, the Prior Art Archive is this new open access system that anyone can upload prior art to and make it searchable by patent examiners. And we have been thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with Cisco and the United States Patent Trademark Office to make this project a reality. And to further our shared goal of improving patent quality in the United States. It's honestly rare that I see a venture in the IP space that is such a win-win for everyone involved. I feel like the value of this is pretty apparent and we haven't even really launched yet and we already have pretty considerable interest across academia, across industry. We have multiple companies who have committed to providing their prior art, not to mention the hundreds and thousands of documents that Cisco and AT&T have already uploaded to the system. And we are also in conversation with multiple institutions, academic institutions across America to talk about replicating the archive to ensure that it is here to stay. Now, many of the key people who have made this project a reality are here today and I am delighted to introduce our first speaker who is the originator of this idea and who has been the main driving force in making this project happen. Dan Lang is Vice President of Intellectual Property at Cisco Systems. He leads a team responsible for Cisco's patent program including portfolio development, licensing, disputes, standards issues and policy. He frequently speaks on patent issues. He is a member of the U.S. Patent Public Advisory Committee. Prior to joining Cisco in 2004, Dan was a partner and co-founder at the patent boutique firm of Ritter, Lang and Kaplan and also previously practiced at Ritter, Van Pelt and Yee as well as Townsend and Townsend and Crew. Dan received a JD from UC Berkeley Boat Hall School of Law in 1993 where he served as Senior Articles Editor to the High Technology Law Journal. Prior to beginning his legal career, he also worked in the defense electronics industry after receiving a Master's in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1986 and a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University also in 1996. Please join me in welcoming Dan Lang. Thank you, Kate, for the great introduction and thanks for the great partnership of the Media Lab in making this project a reality. Launching an online archive at First Blush may not sound very glamorous or important, but actually it is incredibly important. The MIT Media Lab has created this amazing event to educate your ideas and celebrate for just this reason. We're thrilled by the attendance we have here with Director Ayanku, Joito from the Media Lab, some of the top patent legal academics in the country, senior lawyers from a remarkable cross-section of industry. In fact, in this room we have representatives not only from Cisco but also Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Dell, GM, Amazon, Ford, AT&T, Intel, Microsoft and Torch Therapeutics. I hope that I'll be able to convey why I'm excited about this while I share the journey that we in Cisco have been on to support the USPTO in increasing patent quality, how the Media Lab has picked up the torch and how we have now been joined by important partners. We're lucky to have an incredible historic venue here at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I wasn't familiar with the Academy until we scheduled this event, but I'm aware that the institution has long and storied history. One of its early members was one of our country's founders and a notable inventor himself, Thomas Jefferson. The origin of the patent system is the foresight of the founders in encouraging both innovation and sharing information. They wanted to encourage Americans to not only invent but also share their ideas with each other, understanding that innovation required both individual motivation and open collaboration. It was a kind of 18th century industrial policy. But the founders also realized that the monopoly of a patent could carry costs and not just benefits. A patent would be beneficial only if it in fact did represent, in the words of the Constitution, progress in science and useful arts. Over the years since then, the country has sometimes struggled to find the right balance for its patent system. The present day is no exception, and one issue of debate is how easy or difficult it should be to challenge the validity of a patent once it has been issued. Pharmaceutical and chemical companies, for example, often invest great sums of money in reliance on enforceable patent rights and often would then prefer for patents to be difficult to challenge once issued. In the IT industry, we deal with many assertions by entities who buy up discarded patents and need ways to efficiently invalidate the weak ones. Entrepreneurs of all kinds want the benefit of patent protections for their own advances, but can struggle to respond to the patent assertions of others. We can all find a common voice, though, in supporting Director Iancu and his mission to improve the reliability and certainty of patent rights. The director has made clear that the key part of this is to improve the initial examination process. Companies on all sides of the patent debate care about patent quality. Everyone who owns a patent wants to believe that patent will stand up if it is ever asserted. No one wants to waste time and money to defending against patents that should have never been issued in the first place. Weak patents frustrate the expectations of the patent holder, impede follow-on innovation, and ultimately raise prices to consumers. Many of us in this room, including myself, have made our careers in the patent field. We patent practitioners should be especially sensitive to another important benefit of improving patent quality, namely improving the reputation of the patent system, particularly among the very innovators that we want to serve. I mean, for me, that's the exciting part of working in the patent field, working with the great innovators who come up with cool things. My own experience is that innovators in their backers can be quite skeptical of the patent system based on their own experiences dealing with patents that they felt were weak. Having more reliable issued patents, however, means improving examination, which is a big job and a long-term effort. For example, Director Ayanku is pursuing improvements in IT and advances in search using artificial intelligence. But core to the examination process is making it as simple and easy as possible for examiners to find what has already been done so that older obvious ideas are not mistaken for new ones. Achieving this in practice can be complicated. Old patents themselves are not too hard to find. But finding what experts in examination refer to as non-patent literature, or NPL, can be tricky. Different communities of innovators share information in different ways. Some publish in peer-reviewed journals, which may be pay-walled. Ideas may be exchanged at conferences. In our industry, our inventions are often included in publicly available products. Our own inventions here at Cisco may be in documentation that is online one day, but then taken down later for whatever reason, relating to marketing. In the early days of our company, a lot of the documentation was in paper. This was important documentation that's hard to find now. Now, nearly everyone in the patent field realizes that patent quality is important for the reasons I mentioned earlier. But it can be a little bit like the weather. Everybody talks about it, but sometimes people don't actually do anything about it. But we in industry can do something about it. We can do something about making it easier to find prior art, because in a lot of cases the prior art actually comes from us. A few years ago, we at Cisco started to make our documents easier for patent examiners to find. We worked with our internal archivist to find old documentation, scanned it in, and used optical character recognition to get searchable text. We did this for over 160,000 documents. We worked with the USPTO to make it as easy as possible for examiners to use. We created a search interface that allows examiners to search our archive with the same syntax that they use on the PTO's internal tools. Then we posted it on our own servers. There was a link to the archive within the Science and Technical Information Center that examiners access for other search tools. I believe that creating the Cisco archive was a great step forward, but it was only a beginning. We envisioned doing something broader that was open and collected archival materials and not just for Cisco. We started looking for a partner who would create an open platform where anyone could upload prior art. We were very fortunate when Laura Sheridan of Google introduced us to Kate Darling and Barack Berkowitz of the MIT Media Lab as prospective partners. They immediately understood our goals and moved quickly to flush out a plan. Travis Rich from the Media Lab worked with my Cisco colleague, Basca Ronata, and came up with a great architecture very quickly. The archive would be a completely open platform for all to be able to upload. It would incorporate the original examiner-friendly search interface, but also be open to alternative search engines for crawling and indexing, thus accommodating future advances such as artificial intelligence. And to assure longevity and robustness, it could also be easily mirrored elsewhere. Through the leadership and execution of the Media Lab, that is the archive that is now available and being formally launched today. The Media Lab is running the archive, and we already have more companies participating. Google has used its technology to crawl the archive and automatically assign CPC class codes to further facilitate searching by examiners. AT&T is the second company to take the initiative of uploading their own archives to the new platform. But now I am thrilled to share that we are about to reach critical mass and that we will soon be joined by Amazon, Dell, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, and Salesforce, who have all now committed to uploading. The combination of the open platform created by MIT and the USPTO's push for increased examination quality have been a great impetus to participation. What great progress this is to show for our launch day. Based on the interest here, I look forward to the archive expanding rapidly to include more companies and more industries. We all care about patent quality. For a company to make its archival materials readily searchable is not only in the patent system's original spirit of information sharing, but it is also enlightened self-interest. The easier it is for examiners to find technology my company made public earlier, the less risk there is in me having to spend money later to defend against improperly granted patents. Helping the system achieve more reliable patent rights helps ourselves. Now with an open platform we can anticipate further improvements. The new search technologies based on AI will become available and can readily interface with the open architecture of the archive. Mirroring of the archive elsewhere will assure its longevity. Perhaps today will some day be remembered as the beginning of something that contributed significantly to the quality of issued patents. To close, I'd like to thank some of the talented and energetic people who brought this initiative to life. I'd like to thank everyone at the MIT Media Lab for taking the ball and running with it, especially Kate and Travis and for the backing and supporting of Joaito and Barak Borkowitz. For my own company I want to thank Bosco Ronata for his superb program management and advocacy both within the company and externally. And thank you to all my peers in the patent field who have listened to us including the ones who have already committed to archiving. The USBTO I'd like to thank Phillip Chi and of course the leadership of Director Ayanku. His clear focus and reliable patent rights has helped galvanize all of us. Thank you. Thank you so much Dan. Our next speaker is Joey Ido who is the director of MIT's Media Lab. He is professor of the practice at MIT. He's also an investor and serial entrepreneur who's helped start and run numerous tech companies including one of the first web companies in Japan and the first commercial internet service provider in Japan. He's chairman of the Board of Pure Tech Health. He serves on several other boards including the New York Times, the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation and he's the former chairman and CEO of Creative Commons and a former board member of ICANN, the Open Source Initiative and the Mozilla Foundation. He also recently received a PhD from the Keio University Graduate School of Media and Governance and holds two honorary doctorates and many other awards. And he's a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that we are gathered at here today. Please join me in welcoming Joey Ido. Thank you Kate and thank you to everybody who got this started. I think my primary and intense frustration with the process has been the inability for me to have to participate in help in any way and that it really was, this is very much my wheelhouse but this is very much something that just happened without really any of my help. I just, and also just to give some retribution to Kate who gave me a much longer introduction than I had hoped for. Kate joined us, I think it was 2001 when, at least I recruited her around there then because having come from being the CEO of Creative Commons and really fighting for openness, one of the things I wanted to do first when I got to the Media Lab was make a stamp on the world in the field of intellectual property and trying to improve and my fight has always been more about pushing for openness and so what Kate did was she spent a year approximately interviewing everyone at the lab. I was firmly convinced that it meant that we would have to reform everything we had. We would come out with a lot of policy statements. We had Tom Rubin and we had quite a diverse crew and then the report turned out saying well it's very complex and it's very diverse and we really can't do anything. It was a punchline so it was kind of a sobering moment realizing how complex real life is especially at places like the Media Lab and with all of the companies and all of the different types of researchers but the other thing that reminded me of when we were running Creative Commons, people wanted us to be the solution for everything and I said no, no, we're like aspirin and we are a particular solution for a relatively simple problem and it's broad enough and general enough that it's worth doing but it doesn't solve any of these other problems you're asking us to solve and we looked at the patent problem and we walked away. It's just way too complex. It's different in different countries and there's just so much work to do so Creative Commons is necessarily focused on a very narrow element of copyright but I'd always been thinking about patents was sort of what I grew up working in and at the open source initiative we also tackled patents in the context of open source software licenses where patents are often used as both the enforcement piece or the differentiation between the licenses. So patents have always been on my mind especially in the area of software because I think we were talking about the founders I think the old days when patents were really protecting the garage tinkerer from pressure from the outside and protected their investment and time. The economics have changed quite a bit when now filing a patent first of all there are more big companies filing patents I think than garage tinkers and the cost of doing the actual research in many cases especially in software I think has changed and so thinking about when it becomes much easier to file patents and the patent office is kind of getting the modern equivalent of a denial of service attack of all these large companies shooting patents at them what's the appropriate way to keep the quality up and I think that's something that we had been thinking about a lot at the media for two previous generations of directors of the SPTO have interact with us and we've done everything from brainstorming meetings to hackathons trying to figure out how we could positively impact the patent system but it wasn't we were never able to make much progress so I'm extremely thankful for Cisco in actually taking the leadership and figuring out a way that was actually hackathons come up with really cool ideas but a lot of times they don't get to where they can actually deploy and have impact and I also can really thankful for the SPTO for also opening up and being forward thinking in this way because I do think it's a tremendously interesting collaboration that only could have happened at this time with this group of people and we'll hear about what it does and obviously it's a very important project just to give the media lab side I want to thank Gee who's sitting there she's kind of patient zero for this that actually became the example that we were using internally as we thought about what we needed to do and her story is that in 2014 she crowdsourced these things called circuit stickers so there were these stickers with LEDs and circuits on them that you could put on a piece of paper and with conductive ink create circuits in a notebook and it was an idea that she wanted to deploy into the wild and have manufactured and so she wanted it to be open source the hardware was open source and it was a research project and a number of patents were filed that were that covered especially in particular circuit stickers with LEDs on them the people who filed them clearly knew her work and by the time we got around to getting a prior art letter sent to the patent office the patent had already been granted and I remember talking to Gee at the time and even MIT couldn't protect this from happening and I know that the standard protocol at MIT which is also completely broken which is no patent examiners don't look at prior art you have to file a patent and then you can always abandon it but then at least it's in the database and you can look for it and I thought what a broken way to try to prevent other people from from filing patents and what a weird way to try to get things in front of patent examiners and so in that sense Gee had done what we thought was the right thing to do which was to very publicly publish all of her work but she was unable to sort of prevent this from happening and Gee has gone on to become a fellow at the Berkman Center has sort of really dived into trying to help solve this problem but I think the other thing is that we had also some friendly people file patents as well and so I think one of the things that happens is there's sort of a machine that goes through the process of filing patents and so I think this notion of trying to rigorously put together a prior art database I think is essential for students to not have to be afraid of sharing their work which is I think the foundation on which academic knowledge is built but also to be able to talk to companies that we're working with without sort of fear of something funny happening so we're very excited about this we just I think last week launched a project with MIT Press called the Knowledge Futures Group which is really looking at the future of academic scholarship in journals and peer review and we will be talking to you soon because there is also a very interesting relationship I think between the archive and having that connected to academic publishing as well and so I think and Travis who's been doing technology and development on both sides I think that one of the key things we have more I think about a million life science papers a year being published, more papers than you could possibly consume as a human and we probably have more prior art than possibly consumed by a patent examiner and I think this is when we were building the internet one of the great ideas we had which we could just connect everybody and everybody could talk to everybody else there would be world peace and it didn't turn out to be true and just as we're trying to figure out how governance works in media I think thinking about how the creation of knowledge and the sorting of knowledge and the validation of knowledge works both in academic publishing as well as the patent office I think these are all parts of the same problem and hopefully connecting everything was a first piece and we'll figure out how to sort it all out and I think this is a tremendous first step so I again want to thank very much all the companies that are involved and the patent office for being so open to this kind of hacking is a good word at MIT so in this kind of hacking and I very much look forward to building on this beginning and continuing to make this a substantial part of both our work and the contribution to invention in the world thank you very much Thank you Joey and now it is my great privilege to introduce our guest of honor the Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and the Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office Andre Yankou Prior to joining the USPTO Director Yankou was the managing partner of Irel and Manila LLP He also practiced full-time as a member of the Litigation and Intellectual Property practice groups and has appeared in a variety of high-profile matters in front of the USPTO itself in front of US District Courts, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the United States International Trade Commission He has represented clients across the technical and scientific spectra including those associated with medical devices, genetic testing, therapeutics, the internet telephony, TV broadcasting, video game systems and computer peripherals to name a few and in addition to his practice Director Yankou taught patent law at the UCLA School of Law Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming USPTO Director Andre Yankou Well thank you Kate and as I often find nobody really introduces the introducer but I was talking to Dr. Darling a bit earlier it turns out that she has a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich which as you all know is where Einstein went a very important person for the patent system by the way but she told me that she's disappointed she didn't meet him I don't believe her because I'm sure his spirit looms large over there as you know he was a patent examiner when he came up with the theory of relativity and many other theories at about the same time I don't think it's a coincidence by the way that those things happened at about the same time Dr. Darling also apparently is a caretaker of domestic robots so whoever thinks they have a fun job I think she beats us all but anyway thank you for the kind introduction and thank you to MIT and Cisco for hosting today's event in addition to Dan's work at Cisco which you know is okay most importantly for me is that he is on the P-PAC at the PTO a critically important committee that watches us and advises us and plays many different roles so I really appreciate your role there as well okay so here's a riddle what does today's event as we're gathered here in Boston and Kuwait the country and Donald Duck what do they all have in common so the answer is prior art and the prior art archive indeed on September 14 1964 a large ship called Al Kuwait capsized in the freshwater harbor of Kuwait with a cargo of approximately 5,000 sheep on board this was a big deal for the residents of Kuwait because it happened right in the middle of their main source of water and the idea of having thousands of decomposing sheep carcasses in the water supply it would make anyone concerned so the ship obviously had to be raised and due to do so quickly to save the water supply nobody was sure how to do that with such a large vessel how to do it quickly and without causing further damage so bringing cranes would have taken too long and with such methods there is a significant risk that the ship would break on top of it a Danish company insured the ship and they were on the hook for very significant losses so they asked an inventor named Carl Kreuer for assistance and his team came up with a method of raising the ship by filling it with buoyant balls fed into the ship through a tube so did this crazy idea work and the answer is absolutely after being filled with 27 million polystyrene foam balls all airlifted from Berlin and into Kuwait the ship was successfully brought back to the surface the Kuwaiti water supply was saved in 1964 for his part Kreuer went on to apply for a patent on his method of raising sunken ships which on the face of it certainly seemed commercially viable indeed for this method he received patents in the UK and in Germany so all was going well for him until he applied for a Dutch patent and the story is told that Kreuer's Dutch application was rejected because a piece of previously undiscovered prior art was found by the examiner of the Dutch patent office which destroyed the novelty of his invention so what was this piece of prior art you might ask well was it a patent, a prior patent no, no this kind of prior art would likely have been discovered by the examiners in Germany and the UK in connection with the earlier application was it a scientific study on buoyancy and water displacement no, again this sort of prior art would likely have been found by prior examiners familiar with a subject matter of claims was it a historical account of prior attempts to raise sunken ships again, no, well-known historical events of such magnitude also may well have been discovered during earlier examinations instead it was non-patent literature it was in fact Disney's Donald Duck that sunk Kreuer's patent on how to save sunken ships so more specifically it was a 1949 cartoon called The Sunken Yacht which shows Donald Duck and his nephews whom we all know, Huey, Dewey and Louis raising a sunken ship by filling it with ping-pong balls shoved into the ship with the help of a tube I'm not making this up by the way this Donald Duck cartoon disclosed the very same technique that Kreuer claimed in his patent application indeed the cartoon story mapped out all of the essential elements and the functions that were carried out matched the functions in the patent application consequently the Donald Duck cartoon was deemed novelty destroying prior art so as we know it really doesn't matter if it comes from an unexpected or hard to discover source if prior art makes clear that an invention is not new no patent should issue and if it does it should be found invalid so in addition to teaching us all how to raise sunken ships it seems that Donald Duck has imported yet another valuable lesson and not just to his waterfowl nephews but to the patent community at large and that lesson is that prior art can come from anywhere it can come from the most unlikely of places who knew that Donald Duck could supply prior art in fact frankly who knew that Donald Duck would show up in a speech by the patent director the PTO director but anyway here we are anyway and so even if the prior art is not surfaced during examination at the patent office it is entirely possible that it will be discovered years later after issuance by an opponent during disputes such as litigation or licensing negotiations later discovered art of this nature tends to introduce a level of uncertainty in the patent system our goal of course is to reduce uncertainty and increase predictability and reliability patents are critically important to innovation they are the driving force of economic growth job creation and America's leadership in the world but for that the patents themselves that are issued have to be reliable predictable and of course of high quality we all want high quality patents and I think one of the most important touch points of quality is whether an issued patent can withstand the fair challenge down the road surfacing the most relevant prior art during examination and examining in light of that art is critical to ensuring this level of quality for patents that survive the initial examination with the most relevant art in hand one of two things will happen either we at the PTO will be able to help the applicant obtain appropriately scoped claims during the examination or we will not issue the patent at all if we do issue the patent in light of the most relevant art that patent will have a significantly higher chance of success should it be challenged later unfortunately however uncovering the most relevant prior art during examination has become an increasingly more difficult task especially with non-patent literature this is because over the past couple of decades we have been experiencing both a publication explosion and an accessibility explosion the result is that the amount of published literature has been increasing exponentially yet for any one patent application the paradigm remains generally the same there is generally still one examiner with a certain necessarily limited number of hours available for examining that one application on the other hand parties in litigation or other disputes after issuance can more easily scale and dedicate the increased time and resources necessary to find the most relevant art as a result a gap can develop between the art identified during examination and the art an opponent can find during a patent dispute years later and the more people publish the more accentuated this gap can become unless we do something to change the paradigm so in order to increase the reliability of the patent grant we must work to close this gap the short of it is that we must work to change the paradigm of finding and surfacing prior art up front during examination and that's why efforts like the prior art archive you are launching today and is so incredibly valuable when private parties help to collect and surface prior art up front the resulting examination will be improved the information gap reduced and the reliability of the patent grant increased among other things we need tools to collect the relevant art in concentrated locations in order to reduce the time and resources needed to hunt it down and tools to search that art efficiently and effectively this new database is a step in that direction private parties especially those with long histories of innovation are often sitting on wellsprings of information that may be highly relevant prior art but that is also difficult to locate during examination by collecting this information and making it free, searchable and readily available to the entire industry the prior art archive will help our examiners and the public to identify the relevant prior art up front databases such as this one in other words can help reduce the prior art gap as director of the PTO one of my highest priorities is to provide our examiners with the tools they need to ensure that our agency issues reliable predictable and high quality patent rights as I mentioned your new database helps us do that at the PTO we are also working with a host of other tools and programs to help us in this regard for example our expanded collaborative search pilot is designed to leverage search expertise of examiners from different offices around the world to better identify more comprehensive prior art particularly foreign art such as by combining the search results of examiners at the US PTO with the Japan Patent Office and or the Korean Intellectual Property Office before issuing an office action in the patent application additionally the US PTO's global dossier provides free access to patent application information from all participating IP offices around the world on a single website with free English translations too this tool enables our examiners to have streamlined access to work done in foreign offices so they can more easily find relevant references and prior art we also established at the US PTO a task force for identifying or creating artificial intelligence tools to help search the forever increasing amount of information and we are in the process of requesting industry input on AI technologies and the approaches that can be applied to our patent search and examination activities in particular our recent request for information just from a few weeks ago named US PTO's challenge to improve patent search with artificial intelligence seeks technology that would among other things expand valuable sources of search information apply emerging technologies to classification of documents increase the validity and thoroughness of search results and summarize techniques to determine relevancy so if your company has technology that can help or if you think you can develop such AI based search technology please respond to the PTO's recent RFI we are well on our way to change the prior art search paradigm but make no mistake this is a long term project much more needs to be done and we need all hands on deck when it comes to non patent literature much of it is in the hands of private parties this new database now provides a place where that prior art can be collected and in order to help our system others who control this type of literature will hopefully contribute it to the database or other such databases but let me be direct if you have literature that you might use in litigation or another dispute down the line contribute it to this type of a database now so that we at the PTO and the public can use it upfront during examination this will help us increase quality and reliability throughout the patent system that's why the US PTO applauds the efforts of MIT, Cisco and other private companies who are helping to improve the patent system with these innovative solutions alright well the Dutch patent office got lucky in the 1960s to find that Donald Duck cartoon upfront and during examination otherwise they would have been more like Germany or the UK where they issue the patent only to find out later that that patent is invalid thereby reducing the system's reliability of course if Germany and UK had access to this new prior art archive they too would have more likely found Donald Duck and Donald Duck's earlier invention so I look forward to your collection of prior art all in one accessible and searchable database and hopefully it will have more than Donald Duck cartoons so thank you again for your efforts and for the invitation to participate in this truly wonderful event thank you thank you so much Director Yankou I look forward to Disney, Marvel and DC Comics joining us and submitting their prior art to our archive and now at the moment we've been waiting for I'm delighted to invite up our system architects Baskar, Renata and Travis Rich they're going to tell us a little bit more about the archive how it works and how to get involved please welcome Baskar and Travis is there a clicker for the slides? so this moment is special for primarily because it's the first time Baskar and I have met in person we've worked together for a couple of years in this but I always throw a screen and so I wasn't totally convinced he wasn't some new Cisco AI or something but turns out pretty good AI if he is thank you, Travis thank you Kate thank you all of you for supporting this initiative I would like to also thank you USP Tio, Director Andrew specifically Chia Philip who has been the soldier on the ground along with Travis also Google for joining us in providing the CPC code so let's give them and all of you a round of applause I think our agenda is well covered by the story which we just heard that's exactly what the intent behind this initiative was but most importantly this meant to be a solution by industry for industry and by seeing all of you here I do feel that we have achieved that goal as Dan mentioned we have a number of companies already lined up to provide their content Cisco's content is there ATINT content is there and there are Amazon, Intel, Dell, Facebook and I hope to see all of you post their content including Disney so let me quickly go over the slides so I think we all know the goal so I won't repeat but really the goal was to have a patent issued based on the new innovation if the innovation is done by somebody including Donald Duck it shouldn't get issued that was the intention but we quickly realized that it was difficult to find the hidden content which was true in Cisco's case we maintained our library in one of the building in Cisco San Jose office for many years fortunately but we knew tons of content which we used to actually send it to our customers in old days via CDs or technical manual wasn't available on the internet so we were not helping USPTO by keeping all of the documents secured in the lab but not on the internet and all of this documentation is from prior days when internet was there but we were not using that as a media for sharing our content so that's where the journey really began so we launched Journey really started four years back as Dan explained but we actually had a public launch with MIT partnership and Google partnership this year on Jan first to be specific after the shutdown Cisco had since then Cisco has deployed 165k documents we have AT&T also there and then as I said there are five to six companies I'm actually working with them along with Travis to onboard give them access upload their content and all of that is in the pipeline as of today as I speak Archive is actually accessed by USPTO we started this journey with the foundational release and then the current release is actually accessed by USPTO the URL for this website is actually linked from the various sources which USPTO examiners use within the USPTO we all heard that this was possible because initial support from MIT whether it is financial support whether it is infrastructure support talent support in the form of Travis so thank you all of you and now it's ready for your contribution I truly believe this is version 1.0 there is lot to come we need your support we need your content we need your help technology is evolving and we would like to see that this also takes a different shape in coming years to highlight some features one of the key features is we actually wrote a custom parser which is generally not available in other search engines this was possible with closer partnership with USPTO the complex strings or queries or operators which are used today by USPTO are exactly what they are able to use with the new tool that's where the actual Cisco MIT and USPTO partnership actually worked really hand in hand we have integration with the Google we are sharing all our content deployed on this site with Google after doing the deep indexing for getting the CPC code so we have a hand in hand continuous work going on with Google it is actually able to support any number of companies initially we started with Cisco now we have AT&T and we are adding more companies it is actually hosted by MIT in the future as Travis will speak we do plan to replicate this repository across US we get reliable and redundant databases so that if one goes down it is available for searches for examiners we also added some tailor made USPTO features as examiners do their research on the application they attach reports what they looked at as part of their process so site also allows them to actually print the report what they looked at on this particular website and that was again coming from USPTO's input we also have backend and open standard support as we all heard from Andrew technology is evolving so we have kept the architecture very open if anybody has better ideas to use this repository either using AI machine learning or any other new technologies we have the API support so that discontinuously evolve we have website right now hopefully in the future we can actually also develop the app which uses AI and other features that's pretty much from my end I am going to invite Travis to go over some architecture slides thank you Baskar I thought I this is a last minute change that you didn't know but I thought really quickly I just show you what it is partly to show you how uninteresting it is which I think is the goal because at the end of the day we don't want to be inventing some new 3D holographic iron man interface you have to use to find your patents Baskar and the team at Cisco has done a good job of making the transition from what patent examiners are using today to what they will be using hopefully with the system so it doesn't look special which is what we tried really hard to do you go to priorarchive.org you put in your search terms there's some filters for whether you want that to be an and or an or or a near or terms that patent examiners are familiar with when you enter your search term you get a bunch of search results that again are not that special in the way that they look you get a link to the file themselves a short description of where the search term that you were looking for was found in the file and then also all of these CPC codes that Cisco sends a document to Google Google sends back these CPC codes which are then integrated into the search and likewise you have some filters on the right hand if you want to sort by file type or by the source of the company source or by date range hopefully there's not much too interesting to look at there but I think what I do want to spend most of the time talking about is the architecture for how we think we can build this and how we make it sustainable through the future there's really three sections here that I think are interesting there's the uploading of the files from Cisco and from other companies the storage of those files and then the interface to search across those files so really there's three columns it's how we get the content how we store the content and then what we do with the content and I think it's important that those are completely separated because as the Donald Duck story shows we're not going to be able to convince everyone to use the same interface that Cisco uses to upload their content from their company internet onto this database so we need to be open to alternative ways of sourcing the content of getting that content and then making it as seamless as possible for folks to do that in our case right now Cisco had a pathway that worked really well for them they have an FTP interface they upload that we store that content through that final interface but the important separation of that middle blue tier is a project that we've been working on at the knowledge features group that Joey mentioned briefly called the underlay and the goal of the underlay is that it's not so much a single database as it is a protocol for how content can be shared across databases and what's important about that is that in our other work at the knowledge features group we look a lot at how we store scientific literature that comes out of universities and so if the scientific literature and the prior content uploaded through this system are using the same protocol then this search interface can look at both this both these pieces of content I think it will be a hard sell to tell Disney hey upload all of your things to this prior art tool but it might not be a hard sell to tell Disney hey upload all your content to this protocol for your own streaming access project and in doing so you're going to now be on the same protocol that lets us search that content through patent examiner offices to whatever other content is needed and then finally having that data storage layer be separated from the content view of it means that we can create the prior archive but what you each individually can do is you can take that content and build your own interface if you want the Dutch patent office wants to take similar content and put it in French or put it in Dutch, free to do that if you want to run an analysis on that content and say I think I have a better way of searching this content rather than just raw spring searches, I think I can make a face at my screen and do facial recognition and that will give me the patents I want you can build that tool and try it out and when it fails you don't have to feel like you wasted millions of dollars asking everyone to give you their prior content so separating the storage of it really gives us the capability of trying out new interfaces for how we examine how we explore this type of content importantly that blue separated storage layer lets us also distribute this content so if you don't trust MIT to host this content for your private backup if you're a company and the liability of trusting this university to be the long term infinite storage solution for this you can back up that content on your own without any fear that you're going to be messing with the system without any permission from us you can just show up, download that content have your safe storage on your internet so that you trust it and then either build your own interface to that content or just use the publicly available space so the version that we have right now the one that I showed in those past slides I think works really well for Cisco's content it works really well for AT&T and the interface that we've talked about with them but the world is big and companies are diverse and the sources are going to be diverse and so some of the questions I'm looking forward to talking to you at lunch I think there are a lot of open questions we need to ask about how this product remains viable across industry and across domains even simple questions like what type of content should we archive right now we host PDFs and HTML Donald Duck would be missed if we didn't expand to video and if we didn't expand to other types of content so how do we extract metadata from that how do we archive that content in a way that is searchable how do we surface that who should we accept content from right now I think Baskar and Diane and the team at Cisco have made a really good effort at making this real which I think focuses on those who can move first which are these large industry players there's a lot of prior art that is not going to come from these large corporations and we need to be able to give them a place that feels comfortable and accessible and familiar for them to feel like they're part of this initiative yeah what workflows keep the archive up to date and accurate Cisco and AT&T care a lot about this and so they're willing to have staff that show up upload all their back catalog of work upload their white papers but is that realistic for all companies will startups want to do that will they want to hire a person is there some way that we can design a workflow so that as you're creating this content as you're inventing this content it's seamless to get that into the database and to get the database up to date and stable and then lastly how do we govern how do we decide what these interfaces look like what's the coalition of people saying the search interface should be green rather than blue or you know more important decisions like who we accept content from and how we fund it and how we distribute it I think all those questions I know I have a whole bunch of ideas but I don't think it's my opinion that really matters here and so I'm hoping that during lunch you guys can think about these things and also come up with some something that feels sane and reasonable to you all that was the last I had on the slide contacts these are the four people that we had been historically saying you can reach out to which I still think remains true but also hopefully all of you can reach out to each other now to talk about what solutions you think fit best anything you want to add finally no I think that's pretty much as as questions you saw we need help we need additional ideas we need input from all of you because for now it is being babysitted by MIT and Cisco but we really want to make this a coalition of industry so we are looking for more additional help additional hands so please join us thank you guys did Kate leave I'll play Kate next we're going to have a panel led by Dan Lang and Dan if you'd like to come up and introduce your participants sure maybe I'll do that from here and then I'll sit there so our panel is entitled how can we keep improving patent quality and why does it matter and we've got a great slate of experts now we have actually three but right now most of you can only see two and that is because one Laura Sheridan has encountered some severe travel challenges having tried to get here from New York since yesterday and still not quite having made it but we we expect her I think within the next 30 minutes now and we will carry forward with some great content and tell them so I will now introduce the two panelists that are here and then when Laura arrives I will introduce her as well so we have seated on your right Colleen Chen who is a frankly a pioneer in this area of thinking about non patent literature and how to build it up most effectively a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law where she teaches mentor students and conducts a wealth of empirical research on innovation intellectual property and also the criminal justice system from 2013 through 2015 she served in the White House as a senior advisor intellectual property and innovation working on a broad range of intellectual property technology transfer open innovation and related issues Professor Chen is related internationally known for research and publications in the patent system she has testified on multiple occasions before congressional committees the DOJ, the FTC and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office she has also published in-depth empirical studies in the patent field and about the criminal justice system she has an A, B and B, S in engineering from Stanford and her JD from UC Berkeley Bolt Hall Mike Morger who is seated on your left is both a PhD economist he became an economics professor at Duke University and later a law professor at the University of Buffalo he has been at Boston University School of Law since 1999 where he has taught courses and patents intellectual property and public policy towards the high tech industry he has received several grants and fellowships including two grants from the Pew Charitable Trust a Ford Foundation grant an Olin Faculty Fellowship at Yale Law School and a postdoctoral fellowship at AT&T Bell Labs he also has consulted with government officials from developing countries about antitrust law and taught short courses in American intellectual property law at the law faculties of the University of Victoria and the National University of Singapore and then when Laura arrives I'll introduce her because it's hard to introduce somebody when they're not sitting there we are going to start with individual presentations from our panelists and then we have we'll have a nice dialogue about some interesting subjects and then we're going to leave some time for Q&A when the reason for this object will become clear so Colleen would like to start so we just refresh the slides I think this is the last version just changed it can we refresh the slides yeah just refresh it because it's just from the link itself I think this is the version from this is the PowerPoint okay sorry technical glitch for one second so actually I needed that it's on the just the link we can just put the link up that would be perfect maybe while you guys can read my title slide and I'll try to make this case for you today I can just get it on the internet good morning everybody my name is Colleen Chen and I'm very happy to be here today it's such a privilege to be in front of this audience and I'm going to make the case today that while may not be the most glamorous or sexy issue that patent examiner cited non-U.S. patent literature is actually the most important issue in our patent system and I don't say that lightly I hope by the end of the presentation you understand my position well first I'm going to kind of go through this as answers to this question why this is the most important issue in our patent system advance please the clicker's not working just advance there you go perfect there you go the first thing I was surprised no one had mentioned it yet but I think we need to go back to the Constitution remember what the purpose of the patent system is and many of us have read this many of us have memorized this but what I want to keep in mind is that the point of the patent system is to promote the progress of science and useful arts but how do we measure progress advance please we admit we measure progress by looking at what inventions are new and non-obvious over the prior art and we've decided that that is what deserves a patent so central to the entire function and role of the patent system is to develop a level and non-obvious over the prior art next slide please it should work now oh great we need to acknowledge though that this is hard earlier the comments referred to Thomas Jefferson who was one of our first patent examiners and he talked about in his open letter about the patent system and other topics about the difficulty of doing this job we have to remember that the day to day task of a patent examiner is an application in front of them and consider everything in the universe that could be relevant to it is not an easy task he acknowledged this talking about the difficulty of drawing the line between the things that deserve patents that didn't he thought it was so difficult in fact in addition to his other duties as one of the cabinet members that he decided to abolish examination and for a period of time we did not have an examination based system but a registration based system whether or not intervention before the patent office was actually something that deserved a patent we later restored examination based patent granting but for a period of time we didn't have it because it was that hard because we need to worry about this issue because it matters we are here today at this illustrious American Academy but we're being hosted by the MIT media lab where the companies of tomorrow are being launched friends of mine are are investors and we all know people who have come up with great things at the media lab to become great companies later these companies depend on having clear and consistent patent rights but also not having their own freedom to operate be limited by other patents that are out there whether we're talking about pharmaceutical pharmaceutical industry we're talking about digital industries having patent rights that are reliable but also that are not issued over a period of time and we're talking about how interesting technology is extremely important it also matters to the PTO and one of the topics that you hear about a lot today is 101 and I just want to show in comparison to how important 101 is on a day-to-day basis how important prior art to novelty and non-obviousness are so using data from the PTO if you look at the rejections 101 rejections appear in about 11% of office actions but as any prosecutor knows and I did cut my teeth in patent law prosecuting patents so I know this well as well the butter, the bread and butter of the patent office of patent examination of patent prosecution is 102 and 103 and those depend critically on finding the best prior art it also matters to the courts as Judge Ray Chen of the Federal Circuit said recently the Federal Circuit has become a court of validity that's because the place where cases are coming from increasingly is the PTAB and these cases are IPR cases which are essentially cases about prior art they're cases about the validity of a patent in light of new art that comes to light and is used to check the validity of that issued patent district court cases of course also consider validity so do the ITC and court of federal claims but you can see that now this issue of validity is the pervasive issue of the day in our patent system Director Iankou spoke earlier of the publication and accessibility explosion and this is a reality that we must confront as well while the patent system, the US patent system continues to generate patents and patent applications that examiners can find and understand well because they themselves have been involved in their creation non-US patent literature continues to grow and so does this accessibility making it now qualifying as non-patent literature that is to be considered by examiners one example of that is China and China is producing now as you can see in the red bar more and more patent applications and patent grants they're in this form many of them how easy it is for a US examiner to take a reference like this and actually be able to apply it meaningfully it's very difficult and so we need to again keep in mind and we have humility and respect for the patent examiners task of trying to absorb all this new information patent and non-patent non-US patent non-US patent either kind of patent literature or non-US patent non-patent literature in general and consider how that can be brought to bear another reason we need to really pay attention to this issue why I say it's perhaps to me the most important issue but has received the least attention is because US examiners only cite non-US patent literature in a small fraction of cases so this is a statistic from a paper that is published with the Arizona law journal from earlier this year where I've been spending several years with the help of patent data that the USPTO has released as well as BigQuery a tool that Google has made available in whether B is here and has a huge gratitude to him for his assistance with being able to query these huge data sets but we can actually look now at the citation patterns of examiners and actually differentiate not between just whether it's considered a citation or not but whether the examiner cited it and also whether it's considered whether it's non-patent literature including non-US patents, foreign patents or it's patent literature and we see that US examiners only cite NPL in a small fraction of cases and this is the if you look at all the art that examiners cite so it's not all citations that are in the patent but those that examiners rely upon which are star citations, you can see those on the face of the patent you can also read those through your queries you see that only 3% of those citations are to non-patent literature now you can see obviously as well that it's very different by different type of technology and chemistry has a much higher percentage but it is possible to do better and if we look specifically at Europe we can look at patents that were filed in both jurisdictions, we have a natural experiment through the filing of twin applications, the same application filed in two jurisdictions, examine in both jurisdictions what happens to them what is the pattern of citation of non-patent literature and we see that Europe has a much higher citation rate of non-patent literature, a much higher percentage of their patent citation, of their prior art citations are to non-patent literature and there are many reasons for this it's not completely fair to compare the two systems because Europe has a bifurcated system like the rest much of the rest of the world where they examine second after they've done a thorough search of the entire application in the US we examine on demand as the application evolves we do new searches but Europe does everything in the front and they front load the process and they have a high share of X and Y references that are non-patent but not only can we do better, we actually do do better, so this is a graphic that presents this statistic of examiner and peel rate among matched pair IPR patents so this is a selection this analysis was done in 2016 I actually have newly the data from 2018 so I'll update this but if you actually look at the extent to which any NPL was cited in the original file before it went through the whole process of being prosecuted also in Europe and eventually ending up in IPR you see that at the PTAB PTAB decisions are often citing NPL to a level of 40% much higher than what it is happening in examination at 16% Europe in between so we know we can do better we know we actually do better in the PTAB ultimately this question of patent quality when we see it at the IPR stage where so many of us are focused and looking right now we need to go back I would argue into examination and look at what happened in examination and does that impact what happens at IPR so another graph from the paper considers what happens when you submit patents to the PTAB for review well if you had any NPL cited you have a much smaller chance or you have a 15% chance if you had NPL cited that all claims are instituted but if you have but 24% chance of 24% of patents with any NPL had no claims instituted so if you had some NPL it made your chance of institution that much lower the shares also go in that same direction although the difference is not as dramatic now this work is still ongoing and ultimately we will have to look also at adjudication by the PTAB but this gives you a sense that the adjudication and what happens at the examiner level does have implications and ramifications for what happens in the testing of the patents it matters not only today in terms of looking back at what patents were doing in examination that are now in IPR but it also matters to the future Dr. Yankou talked about AI and anybody who is familiar with AI knows that the AI process is built on using existing information historical data to try to build and predict the future in an AI we often talk about bias bias that might occur because you have incomplete data non-representative data or because what you want to happen in the future does not reflect what happened in the past we are training AI to predict the most relevant prior art based on past examiner behavior we are reinforcing the bias against non-pat literature and I've talked to several AI companies that are doing prediction for prior art and they're training on patents because that's in the public domain they're not training on non-pat literature because it's copyrighted it's hard for them to ingest all those references even ones that are cited by the patent office so this is an important consideration if we're going to be moving towards AI to keep in mind as we go forward those are my comments thank you very much that's coming right before the slides appear I want to thank Kate for inviting me thank Joey and Dan, the folks at MIT and Cisco and the director for making this happen and I especially want to thank the director for giving me an exam question so my students are going to have to work through this issue about Donald Duck and perfect perfect question for an exam so thanks very much in a moment we'll see some slides here but I can tell you what I'm going to be talking about issues on my mind first I want to talk about what are the business incentives to acquire high quality patents and to acquire low quality patents second thing that I want to talk about and I'll talk more about is what are the social costs that are created by the issuance of low quality patents so let's begin by noting that the quality of a patent is determined jointly by the efforts of an applicant and the efforts of an examiner and my work or my comments right now are going to complement Colleen's comments think about Colleen is talking a lot about the activities of the examiner and how access to better NPL will improve the efforts of the examiner I want to talk also about the incentives on the part of the applicant to create high quality so to start thinking about this it's critically important that people recognize that the patent system is different for chemicals, pharmaceuticals medical devices on the one hand and probably all other technologies on the other and you should recognize that patent applicants are going to be differently in these two different worlds so let me establish first of all that there is a difference in the world of patents so this slide comes from work I've done with Jim Besson and you can see that in the top row we look at US patents and we find that the typical US patent ends up in litigation about 2% of the time and the value of the typical US patent can be calculated in different ways one way to calculate it is to look at the annual decisions or payments of maintenance fees so I'm not focused on the magnitude of these numbers right now I'm actually interested in comparison across the rows and chemical inventions including pharmaceuticals appear to be much more valuable than the typical patent and they are also litigated much less often that's pretty interesting to an economist economists think that they are more valuable should be litigated more parties will find it worthwhile to go and fight when the assets really valuable so what does this mean the valuable assets, the valuable patents are high quality patents and they are not going to be litigated as much there aren't as many opportunities to attack them and that reflects in part the behavior of the examiner but I think to a greater extent it reflects the behavior of the applicant so I have a new chemical entity I hope the FDA will approve my ability to market this as a new drug I will exhaustively search the prior art when I'm drafting my patent claims when I'm submitting my disclosure of prior art sources I'm going to have a really good understanding of the landscape and I make choices in the claims that I draft and the submissions I make to the patent office that are going to help ensure that the patent that issues is one of high quality it makes a lot of sense ex ante for the applicants to make that sort of investment when it comes to other sorts of technologies let me pick on software sometimes you'll get inventors that care a lot about generating a high quality patent and they'll take the steps that make that likely to occur but in many cases these inventions are more marginal it's worth the trouble to get a patent but not worth the trouble to get a high quality patent so the data up here indicates that with software patents they're litigated more than twice as often as a typical patent and they have less value than a typical patent and I think that reflects various quality problems including difficulty in locating prior art so we've got these two different worlds and let's see if we get some kind of downstream result in terms of validity and I think we do so my initial claim less effort is often used by applicants when they submit software and many other sorts of applications compared to the gold standard of chemical patent applications what might the consequence be an economist and lawyer Sean Miller finds that 27% of US patents would be found at least partially invalid if subjected to an anticipation or obviousness decision that's not my current interest my interest again is the comparative numbers right here he finds that especially problematic are software and business method patents that seem to have a much higher rate of invalidation or invalidity this is likely predicted in validity this is not reporting on actual outcomes but on cases it's econometric predictions that he's making that seems to track what I was saying about incentive to invest in producing high quality inventions as it differs across technologies this seems also to be consistent with Colleen's work in the Arizona state law journal article that she was talking about a second ago Colleen finds comparing US and European patents that US patents seem to be higher quality when it comes to chemicals so that seems to make a lot of sense that where the application likely is going to be a very high value you see applicants making a big investment initially let's stop and think about the 27% number for a second is that too high it seems like a fairly high number can we do better Colleen and the director both have talked about how difficult this examination task is and I think we can do better I think building up this prior database will help us do better but there are inherent limits to how well we can do I think we have to be realistic and accept that there will be some mistakes I'll talk more about that at the end of my talks and we'll probably talk more about that in Q&A so what is the social harm created by issuance of low quality patents I think the answer to that question to a great extent has to do with the activity of parties called non-practicing entities and problems created when they assert low quality patents against innovators so remember the low quality patents that I was describing are born in an environment in which these are marginal inventions might get patented might not we don't invest a lot in producing high quality because their low quality inventions are often not implemented a lot of patents lots of technologies are generated will mix and match and try a few and some of them will work but the patents will survive and many of these patents migrate into the hands of these non-practicing entities and they often will assert patents but notice the pattern across technologies here how often is a non-practicing entity asserting a patent on chemicals it's very rare those are high quality patents they're not picked up by these non-practicing entities same thing will be true with drugs and medical patents the concentration is overwhelmingly in computer and communications so it seems as if we have a problem for particular technologies lots of patents a lot of them might not be high quality and a lot of them are picked up by these parties called NPEs so far I've just asserted that's a problem but I haven't told you why so now I want to spend some time talking about our social costs associated with low quality patents that come from these parties called NPEs patents asserted by NPEs some interesting work recently done by Cohen Grun and commoners initially lays out the patent desertion landscape and you should notice that when two parties in a patent lawsuit are both practicing entities so for example Monsanto's Dupont we can see the frequency of those lawsuits are pretty steady over the last decade at about 500 of those lawsuits and the explosion in patent litigation is attributable to the activity of the NPEs so you see the other two lines indicating that upward trend that's an explosion of activity by these folks who are often making frivolous assertions that is a strong statement and there are lots of different ways to gain insight into the behavior of these parties and so let me provide you one bit of evidence right now from the same authors they noticed a very interesting pattern of behavior when it comes to patent desertions that suggest that there's something opportunistic about many of these NPE lawsuits so Cohen at all take a look at litigation between two practicing entities my laser has disappeared the top set right there the baseline probability of being sued by a practicing entity and what happens if you happen to be a cash rich target will you be more likely to get sued by a practicing entity the answer is no but on the other hand if you take a look down here at the bottom non-practicing entities you see a dramatic bump up in the probability of having a patent asserted against you if you are cash rich one common fact pattern seems to be successful start up ready to launch its IPO they get targeted by these NPE assertions it suggests that there's something other than the merits of the technology that's driving the decision of who gets sued and I want to attribute it to the plethora of low quality patents that are available for assertion by these parties okay so I haven't gone far enough yet to demonstrate any sort of social harm the same authors go on to tell us that these NPE suits have an impact on innovation targeted firms after settling with NPEs or losing to them reduce their R&D on average by greater than 25% my frequent co-author Jim Bessen and I have similar work that leads to a similar conclusion and I'll talk about a little bit more work that pushes in that same direction so it seems as if low quality patents are leading to a problem of assertion by NPEs Colleen talks about a particular subset of those NPEs called PAEs patent assertion entities and they seem to be creating a social problem by imposing a tax on innovation a lot of technology companies say hey look it, we're being sued, who are these guys where did this patent come from we had no way of predicting this in advance we couldn't have designed our technology in a different way to avoid this suit so is it possible that reforms like improving the quality of examination by getting NPL literature into the hands of examiners to make a difference I think yes but we don't yet have evidence on that so I want to detour a little bit and talk about another policy innovation that I think was quite successful the Supreme Court was the innovator and the Supreme Court apparently motivated or some of the justices were motivated by just this concern about non-practicing entity patent lawsuits they reformed the patent system by reducing the likelihood that a successful patent plaintiff would be able to get an injunction prior to the eBay case just about 100% of the time successful patent asserters would get injunctive relief after the eBay case the numbers dropped to something around 70% but not all patent asserters are treated equally NPEs like chemical companies usually almost always close to 100% of the time will still get injunctive relief it's the NPEs that have suffered because of the eBay case where they're much less likely to get injunctive relief now so did that make a difference well evidence from an economist named Metzanotti says yes it did make a difference he says that before eBay technology companies that were heavily exposed to patent litigation had trouble justifying investment in financing they faced financing constraints because of the threat of litigation and those constraints seemed to have lessened following the eBay decision he looks at what investors in public PAEs, patent assertion entities thought about the eBay decision and they thought it was bad news for that kind of business the cumulative average return on the shares dropped about 10% with the eBay decision indicating that business people thought oh, eBay, it could have a significant effect on the activities of these NPEs finally Metzanotti says that the companies most at risk from inadvertent infringement or frivolous patent assertions saw their R&D intensity increase after the eBay decision and their patenting activity increased after the eBay decision and also he said that the likelihood of patenting breakthrough technologies increased after the eBay decision so evidence that reform, not in the terms of better NPL databases but in the form of lessening the bargaining power of NPEs through the eBay decision had a real impact on things that we should care about alright so let me conclude by talking about a reason that we should be a little bit cautious we can't be too enthusiastic about positive social returns from this sort of reform because there's more to low quality than simply not seeing the relevant prior art an examiner who now has access to non-patent prior art will take that reference compare it to a claim and with the 102 question I look to see if identity is satisfied something that's very difficult in many cases for examiners is knowing exactly what the claim is you need to parse the claim and identify corresponding limitations in the prior art and examiners are under a lot of time pressure because the number of patents they have to examine is very large the language that they're working with may be ambiguous or may be vague making it difficult to make the proper assessment so even when the prior art is available you still have a problem the problem is attributable to the vagueness of the language in many patent claims so and Haravell were particularly interested in this problem and here's what they found they looked to see what kinds of patents are acquired by non-practicing entities and they said that NPEs purchase and assert patents that were granted by a specific set of examiners who tend to allow incremental patents with vaguely worded claims in contrast purchasing behavior of practicing entities is not skewed toward any particular subset of examiners think about the practicing entities going out and acquiring patents because of their technological merit and the different behavior of many of the NPEs looking for weak patents well looking for patents that will be cheap and potentially valuable in assertion maybe in a frivolous setting so low quality patents they're looking for I've indicated initially were low quality because they might be vulnerable to 102 or 103 challenges but beyond that they may be valuable because they have malleable claim language that might be read in a surprisingly broad way and so that even though I'm enthusiastic about this policy reform I want to caution that there still are more problems out there that we need to worry about but let's take a break so we're kind of ahead of schedule sounds good I know my next call for recruiting an archive company to archive work with me the townspeople oh yeah he was a patent expert he was like a high school teacher he was a patent expert right yeah we'll just I'll do maybe like a question or two with the existing panel and then we'll bring her in we're going to get started again please take your seats so Laura has not arrived yet but we're going to start the panel and as she arrives we will join where's Colleen oh right here great so we'll do some questions with our panelists who are here and I think at some point we still expect Laura to arrive and then I think Laura has her own remarks and we will continue some interactive dialogue among ourselves and then I think we still should have some time for so thanks everybody for the flexibility I know that it seems like people have had some travel channels just to overcome and coming from near and far and I appreciate everybody being able to make it let me start sort of from an economic standpoint maybe first to Mike who presented a lot of interesting information about about incentives and how different pieces of the system are responding if we're talking about moving forward with an archive like this what are the incentives for let's say an individual business to spend a modest amount of effort to make it's prior easier to find I mean how do you think about that in terms of a system like this part of my answer depends on what Travis was telling us and Baskar was telling us before about how easy it is how low cost if I'm interpreting those comments correctly that's going to be critical we're talking about in economics jargon we've got a collective action problem or we've got a public good that's being created so business is going to think well I pay the price of putting my prior art into this archive and maybe it'll pay off for me but probably it's going to benefit somebody else so why would a business want to do that there's good will that will be associated with that you get a good reputation but also there can even in the business world be cooperative incentives if industry works together and I contribute because I see others are contributing and I'll keep contributing if others keep contributing you know that's sustainable there are examples many examples of trade associations where public goods for the industry are created by a trade association contributions are made by industry members to support industry wide advertising or industry wide lobbying or industry wide R&D so don't despair just because this is a collective action problem just because it's a kind of a public good there are lots of examples of businesses getting out there and working together to contribute to something that is collectively beneficial to the industry costs are key and so if the costs are high that's really going to discourage participation but it sounds in this case as if the costs are not too high one other concern which I think is not a big deal is that I might have the magic sword that slays a dragon I might see a patent out there that's threatening a lot of people in my industry and I might think well I'm going to keep this to myself and maybe my rivals will be sued and they'll lose because they won't have this valuable piece of prior art I think that's unrealistic you know I don't think that people really know when they're holding a magic sword like that and so I don't think there's any particular incentive to suppress so I think as long as contribution is not expensive and as long as businesses don't come to see some subset of their prior art as being especially valuable in a competitive environment like the one I described I would be optimistic I would think that people will get on board any comments Colleen I would just add that if and I think historical precedent bears this out but if I'm working in an area and I decide I don't want to patent my product I'm still just as Joey said at risk that somebody else will patent it later and prevent my freedom of action or put me in a situation where I have to then drag out the prior art try to date it and then go through the litigation so you know IBM spent a lot of money putting they do patent a lot but they also spent a lot of money doing defensive publication and I can see that they're still very invested in the quality of patents and so they put out patents we've had the statutory invention registry we've had many ways that there has been a recognition of this problem like we're here in the moment but there's been recognition IBM would say well we're not going to patent this but we don't want somebody else to patent it either we don't want the patent office to miss the fact that this has already been out there chosen by us not to patent it so we want to put that out there and there are many communities who've chosen to opt out of patenting affirmatively but they want to defensively ensure that they still have freedom of action that's you know this essential operating requirement for many many firms so I think you know just wanting to protect themselves from being patented on their own technology is a pretty strong incentive but the ease of putting it in becomes a lot easier now with something like this I don't think historically it's been that easy great so now as you can see we've been joined by Laura Sheridan thank you thank you for coming and we appreciate your persistence in getting to us through your travel or deals and Laura is Senior Patent Counsel at Google leading a team focused on developing Google's Global Patent Portfolio Strategy she also works on patent policy issues and speaks regularly like today on patent related topics including patent quality and post grant challenges under the IAA Laura is active in the IP community serving as co-chair for the Intellectual Property Owners Association Women IP Committee and the New York Intellectual Property Law Association Corporate Counsel Committee and helping to form the New York Chapter of Chips which is an organization that was started in part by my former boss she's also a member of the NYU Law Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy Advisory Board Laura studied engineering at Cornell and received her JD from Fordham Law School so welcome Laura and thanks for coming I'm so glad to be here is this working I think so I think when I got behind the trash truck just five minutes ago I thought this wasn't meant to be but here I am and I'm really happy to be here Dan how much time should I a few minutes to keep it relatively brief given the latest you could do five minutes so I wanted to use my time to put into context the prior archive and the important work that has been done by MIT and by Cisco and put that archive in the broader context of patent examination and a topic that's near and dear to me and the policy work that I do and the strategy work that I do at Google is really what I believe the PTO's core function to be all about and that is to issue valid and reliable patent rights and when the PTO does not satisfy this core function it can have downstream results that can be detrimental to innovators like Google and to the folks in this room so we encourage the PTO first and foremost to direct ample attention to this issue it's something that deserves attention at all levels of the office and it's really important to stakeholders and I think you'll find that America's most innovative companies are behind this we support this we want to have the PTO focus on this important area and I know that the patent bar has a lot of other issues it's discussing right now things like IPR and eligibility and those are of course important issues also discussing keeping fees down but really those don't reflect the concerns of stakeholders at large and the tech community and I think you'll find that to be the case when you ask what the issues that are most important to them it's really fulfilling this core function of valid and reliable patent rights coming out of the office so just to frame the remarks a little bit better I mean it's helpful to think about what's at work when I say the core function is valid and reliable rights and it's really the reality of what a patent examiner does on a day-to-day basis so thinking about that a little bit when a patent application goes to the office it gets classified by a technology CPC code and it gets routed to the right examiner for that code and the examiner adds it to the pile of a lot of work that's already on his or her plate and then the examiner will review that application they have to read it in detail and prior art to apply to it they have to then write that down in the written record how the prior art applies to the claims and then they have to engage with all of us the stakeholder the patent applicant on those rejections of the claims and eventually reach an outcome and that is just in reality it's a lot to do and it's a lot to be on an examiner's plate but it's a really important matter and it's something that's not trivial when you think about the fact that it's patentable unless proven otherwise so it's not as if you don't get your patent the examiner doesn't do anything the examiner must do his or her job in order to have the right rights come out of the office so it's not trivial and when you look at the fiscal year 2018 numbers we had the second highest year of grants at over 300,000 again coming from the patent office so there are a lot of issued patents coming out and a lot of work on examiner's plates or this is done right so I just briefly want to encourage everyone in this room to participate because you know it's not on the office to improve this by itself it's a two-way street patent quality is a two-way street and it's on both applicants and the patent office to work together to achieve this result and what I mean by that is as patent applicants we have to file patent applications that actually describe what we invented many of us in the room who were brought up to prosecute early on we may not have always done that it's a must you have to do it there's post-grant review proceedings in place that if you want to survive challenge you will file a patent application that can pass muster downstream so that's it first and foremost but we also need to participate we need to participate in examination in a way that's more than just saying as little as possible in order to get an application through the patent office it doesn't help us it doesn't help the system at large but the system needs to incentivize that behavior too I mean I'm not naive to think that every applicant is going to want to participate that fully and have a written record that details all of the arguments so the system needs to make sure you know the legal requirements are being regularly and thoughtfully applied then on the flip side for the patent office I'll just close with a few ways a few things to think about because for the patent office there's a lot of issues at work here there's IT having proper IT in place infrastructure that allows sophisticated search and examination but also one that allows for buildouts of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology one that allows for experimentation we see the office looking more and more to do that and that's wonderful examiners also need to be trained legally and technically technically trained examiner is a good one but in areas like AI complex science and it's moving so quickly it's not the easiest thing to do to make sure examiners are up to date on the technology and on the law of course as a lawyer I can attest to the fact that it's an ever moving target and for examiners it's a lot to both have to know the law and then to apply it regularly to be a gatekeeper of quality so what much of this boils down to for the patent office is time examiners need it they need more time to do their jobs and the current system that's in place based on production based on quantity isn't necessarily conducive to this sort of quality output so I've suggested it before and I'll suggest it again all solutions should be on the table when it comes to looking at how an examiner can do his or her job to get the best output from the office so I encourage innovation on the part of the office just like the innovators who file patent applications every day and I just want to reiterate it because I didn't get to say it up top I'm so happy to be here and happy to be a part of this event and participating in the launch of this amazing archive and I don't know if Ian's been introduced yet but Ian whether be our Google patents lead is here so if you want to talk more about Google's participation please do find Ian thank you and thanks for bearing with my lateness. Thank you so we've talked a lot about the difficulties of search and some of the discussion has been in the context of the challenges experienced by the IT industry in terms of patents that are maybe difficult to search maybe weaker than other patents and other industries how can an archive like this help other industries I'm very happy of the interest that we're getting from beyond the IT industry in this room we have people from the automotive industry and the pharmaceutical industry how can an archive like this play a role in other businesses not just related to computers I can start that off so I think of course this was born of issues that are unique to the software industry or at least they were unique to tech and to software where a lot of our best prior art was hard to find it wasn't digitized it wasn't easily searchable and this was really born of the recognition that we need to make sure that it is but as all these other industries start to get more into the application of software to their spaces and have inventions that are really bleeding across the borders of what was once traditionally pharmaceutical or automotive and really are much more software applications you want to make sure that this information is available and it's just as important to other industries as this technology shifts as it was for us for us it was a sense of urgency and I think now other industries can benefit from that it seems to me that there are again there has been recognition by other industries of this issue over the years so thinking back to the financial industry worrying about patents and the effort that they invested to not have an archive but actually find their own prior art collect it and then go and educate patent examiners and now that we have programs like the PETTP I think it's a technical training program of the patent office and we have stick and we have other ways of getting that information forward I think that industry feels like they've used a version of the archive to inform their efforts I was just talking to someone from Johnson & Johnson about a really interesting anecdote that I had never heard of in the pharmaceutical industry with trying to find prior art in the late 90s I believe and he can correct me but there were a number of chemical structures or medical devices that were expressed in Russian Cyrillic texts in universities and so anybody they had to go find those and anybody who's been litigation knows that they put a huge effort into finding prior art and surface in a different way so I think the recognition that this has been an issue is well understood and the question is again how this archive can really bring together those efforts and you to find them and I think that's an exciting thing to explore I just second what Laura said is that AI is becoming pervasive software is showing up in lots of different industries and so where we have software AI issues related to any kind of technology if it's got a medical application or it's you know chemical engineering process or something like that it's called the finding that relevant prior art art another way of looking at this is a lot more innovation is recombinant taking different pieces from lots of different technology domains and so in the old days you might think that if I'm pharma all of the important technologies in the past were patented my scientists love to publish and so it's pretty easy to get our hands on NPL as well as seeing all the relevant literature being showing up in patent applications global patenting of pharma has always been a widespread practice so it used to be that we didn't care so much but I think to the extent that information technologies are intersecting with medical technologies that's going to drive a greater need even for life science or medical innovators to look across a lot of software related NPL now I remember a story from my early days of practice I worked with a partner who is representing a life sciences startup and in order to best protect his client from patents being wrongly granted to his competitors he actually collected a binder of prior art and gave it to the examiner to physically have in her office an examiner who was working in this area and I thought that's a pretty savvy thing to do and it's actually in a way a very miniature version of what we could be said to be doing here and that we all can act in our self-interest and make sure that the examiners in our areas have the art that they need. Actually can I speak to that briefly? Sure. So the PTO's existing program Colleen mentioned PETTP as the patent examiner technical program and it allows for that and the program is evolving where you can help your examiners you can help your art units by saying this is the most relevant stuff you should be looking at so to the extent I mean maybe nowadays it's not a binder it might be a digital form but it's something that the office encourages that they've said to us when we've offered it please do that and help us understand because you can virtually train you can go on site and train but you can also provide digital materials which I encourage everyone to think about doing. You mentioned the story of the Russian prior art that was raised by our colleagues from Johnson to Johnson but what in general can international cooperation provide? We have the IP5 process and we have a lot of talented people at the US patent office who are working with their counterparts to make the searching process more coordinated and more knowledge sharing what are the further opportunities there? I could start that one off I mean this is something that I think is so important so international work sharing I think it's sort of the micro view and the macro view and so most at least for large corporations you're filing patent applications not just in the US but in Europe and Japan and China and all over the world and the potential for prior art to just be shared between examiners rather than sort of in one office and maybe it's shared as part of an information disclosure process but it's not really facilitated all that well there's just so much potential there for work sharing across examiners and not just having the expertise of one but having multiple examiners and they're piloting right now at the PTO a PCT collaborative search pilot where you can actually do this in your international application. We're giving it a try to see how it works but our hope is we want to make decisions about dropping a case or not but at the macro level I hope we'll see more sharing of best practices on how to do this especially as we get into the application of AI. I think all of the offices are racing to do that best and I think that's a good goal but I hope to see the offices working together once that happens to share some of the learnings and hopefully improve it across the globe. I'll definitely say I've been very encouraged by the PTO's openness to innovate and try new things and collaborate so in addition to the program you talked about global dossier work has been extremely important and I think the issue again is there are just some fine tuning that needs to happen in order for a US examiner to take advantage of the search results of a foreign examiner who may have done a search before. I talked about the EPO and how they have a different type of examination where they bifurcate and do the examine the entire patent up front and get all the prior art forward. Now a US examiner in theory could take advantage of that but a couple things need to be true for that to take place first they need to get that search report in a timely fashion at the right time and they need the time to actually ingest those references it takes time to look at a new reference. The reason it's there's a high rate of patent citation I believe within the US patent offices because we all stick within our domains. Academics do it and we tend to look at what's in front of us and so I tend to cite law review articles when I write a law review article. I'm not citing other pieces which might be more relevant. So what the patent office is doing is completely natural they're doing what everybody else is doing which is to look in their domains but when they do have the chance to look at something else it takes a lot of investment and effort to then kind of think about that process it and apply it that's why I think the CPC code work is so important is kind of the patent office to say I've got this C of references I have to look at which ones should I really be focusing on but then do I have the time to read all these new references so that's where I think Laura's absolutely the right that time is an important ingredient. However I am actually pitching or advising right now an experiment I think the PTO could try with time on demand rather than giving everybody more time say that examiners themselves know best when they need that extra time so give them some flexibility in allocating that and maybe using a team approach I can talk about that separately if people are interested in it but I think that recognizing that it takes more time to read NPL it takes more time to find it is an important part of trying to then get us to be able to use it more robustly. I recall that Mark Lemley wrote a paper he's written the papers on many things but one of the papers that I remember about what the optimal amount to invest was in initial examination quality and there was a suggestion well maybe it's not worth spending too much time in initial examination because there's a lot of patents are going to get issued and very few of them are ever going to be in dispute so why do we want to put all this effort in at the front end first of all I'd be interested if people want to comment whether they agree or not so how does that change if we can make search and finding prior art more productive in examination more efficient almost everything I said was in disagreement with that observation by Mark but I love that paper and the basic insight that Mark offers in the paper is right so what was problematic in the paper was illusions that weren't very careful about what the right balance might be but so here's the point the paper is called rational ignorance at the patent office and the observation is that it's very difficult as Colleen was telling us in her slides to properly examine a patent application we've got lots of claims you don't have very much time even when you have all the prior art in front of you you may not understand what the claims are you may not understand the technology as well as others down the road the litigators are going to understand it much better have the benefit of the help from lots of experts and so I can't imagine a patent system in which we don't have lots of mistakes and I think the high priority for the patent office is to figure out where mistakes are likely to occur and try to minimize the social cost of those mistakes and the literature that I was citing helps us quantify the social costs that might be associated with mistakes if we could answer questions like a mistake in 112 versus 102 which one is more socially costly I don't think we know the answer I'm sure we don't know the answer to that but that would be a great question to answer especially if the answer to that question was different in chemical engineering from autonomous vehicles or something like that in my ideal world the patent office I think about allocating examiner time differently in different technologies encourage people in some art units to spend more time looking at 112 issues in other art units say it's hopeless examiners are never going to be in a position to figure out whether undue experimentation would be acquired by a person having ordinary skill in the art to make this technology work I truly think it's hopeless for some technologies to ask the PTO to do that and the answers should differ across technology industries make a difference too so if I was the patents are I start to get the agency to think strategically we can treat all applicants the same but we can still devote more attention to certain issues and certain technologies so I forgot what the question was was Lemley right the question was I've now forgotten too but I think it was how does that change how do the incentives change if we have more efficiency of course he's more wrong as the cost of generating good NPL is going down so we can move more of the burden of figuring out if patents really are proper move that out of the courts move it out of the PTAB and move it into the office to the extent that the examination process is getting easier what I'd really like one last comment this is a joint effort of applicants and examiners we put too much of the burden on the agency we should ask more of applicants I want to push back on the idea that there necessarily higher quality requires necessarily much more time and I also want to push back on the idea that it's I guess in the applicant's best interest to have a kind of fast and low cost process because I would again point to Europe and I spent a lot of time looking at their system and trying to compare and I came to this puzzle where Europe grants fewer patents but then they have higher satisfaction if you look at sort of the global rankings in terms of patent quality customer satisfaction certain areas at least according to AIM surveys but there it seems to be a consensus among examiners among applicants and others that Europe has a very high standard when it comes to patent quality and so I think my kind of the conclusion I came to after looking at the European process and detail and trying to understand how we could learn from it is that there is a big investment up front of time in doing a really good search and the EPO patent quality office will say that's the fundamental first step in the patent examination process is doing a thorough, thorough search so we'll put a lot of hours in that but if you look at the reason people why EPO actually issues fewer patents in the U.S. on again these twins you would say well it's because they're a tougher office but it actually ends up being the case that it's because applicants end up withdrawing more because they see that patent research result back they get the research result and the search report and they say oh yeah we know from this we have a level of certainty going back to the question of certainty that we're not going to get something that's worthwhile on this application so we're going to save the money and save our time and not participate more fully so again I think quality and time invested up front can be time spent more efficiently because it does save all those cycles of going back and forth in RCEs and trying to actually figure out now this reference emerges at the very end because I've redrafted my claims if I had known about that at the front end then I could have shortcut this process and really focused on the applications that I knew I had something truly novel so I do think there's a question and we can again we don't have to get to a point of perfection there is some level of ignorance that is rational but we can get to the point where we can exceed the Europe in terms of at least kind of look at that as a comparator with respect to satisfaction quality and appeal citation I think that would be a great goal to consider and we do have to acknowledge that US examiners are way more productive than European examiners on a per person basis in terms of the volume so we do want to keep our efficiency that's what helps the US patent system operate more efficiently and get rights out that are needed for companies that are important so can we have all of those things together we think that's open but I do think actually IT can be part of the solution as well because you do have AI technology being able to do matching and image recognition it allows matching to be more possible also for AI to match words that don't look alike but that have the same meaning in an underlying way I think it's very exciting that the patent office is looking at the technology for those reasons but I do think we have an opportunity here to really you know through this kind of work to draw attention on what's possible here and I'll just add from the industry perspective I mean I agree with what's been said so far and I think just for us it's not the existence of the patent litigation that's the real problem I mean the it's going way back to when you have 300,000 patents issuing year over year and not really being entirely sure what's in all of them and that's the real issue so there could be some that are valid there could be some that aren't but it's the uncertainty that just having that number and having the ability to understand what could be applying to products that you're going to be launching or inability to do so in the software space as it so happens so I think really the issue and I don't think we're going to get to perfection I mean I'm not suggesting that we strive for perfection but I think improvements in technology and search will help give examiners the additional time that they need just by being the more efficient up front and I do reiterate that the search is so critical doing it right doing it thoroughly up front so that you're not going back and forth on on that piece and really everybody's on the same page from the first office action in the process it's more efficient actually and I think people will be happier with the result but it really isn't about perfection but it has to be something that doesn't simply you know say the end result of so few patents are aggregated that means that we really don't have a need to drive quality I just don't agree with that I agree with the sentiments that have been expressed feel bad about not having Mark to defend his work but I agree I think we still have a few minutes that we could do Q&A so now the purpose of this will become apparent this is a throwable microphone I am told and that if you ask a question you will be thrown it all right I think we have over here the first page can you hear me hello everybody thanks for doing all this so cool and so I'm kind of coming at this from an independent inventors perspective which is I love that this resource is free and so accessible I presume but it is for industry by industry so far so I'm curious if you could all speak to what is the role of the independent inventor as innovation comes from places like maker spaces and fab labs and libraries even up to universities and academia because as a grad student we really don't think a whole lot about patents so if you could just share a little bit more about that I can take it started at least I remember the first time that we medicaid you talked about the fact that the media lab itself was very interested in being able to archive materials for later and I saw the 60 minutes segment about the media lab a couple weeks ago and it was fascinating to see some of the work that had been done first in academia that 20 years ago they had like turn by turn navigation which patent lawyers actually at the time told them to not allow patenting because it would never be allowed for regulatory reasons so always a mistake to let patent lawyers give you advice on things outside of patents but the point is obviously this isn't just about big companies because we know that innovation comes from a much broader ecosystem including individuals the fab labs and maker spaces that are emerging now academia and they all should be welcome to upload and they all benefit from creating the IP system that encourages innovation and collaboration so the four or five of us when we were on a phone call getting ready for this panel we talked about this issue and one thing that we talked about was that these big companies like Cisco and AT&T we hope are producing a public good where the benefit spills over maybe especially to startups you know we have seen evidence that a lot of these patent assertion entities will target successful startups right before IPO and that really disrupts plans of the folks that want to bring a product to market but now their time is being sucked into this legal dispute you know they don't want to know about patents they didn't want to learn that someone out there had a patent against them and now the technical people and the managerial people their time is all absorbed by this dispute it's very disruptive, very costly and by weeding out more of these low quality patents we hope that the degree of that problem will significantly decline I would add to that and Mike is absolutely right and I actually have friends who are delaying their IP is because of patent lawsuits and patents they think should never have been issued and they've been trying to IPR they were actually stopped by the Assigner of Stoppel Doctrine there's like interesting things where they had prior art that they could assert but then because there was an assignment issue they couldn't assert it in the IPR so they were trying to use the patent system to vet these issues but they're delaying their IPO for this very reason but I will say at the same time what it comes down to is certainty right we don't want to say patent litigation is bad sometimes it's necessary and it's important but what we want to say is when a patent is asserted we don't want to feel like we have no idea whether this patent is actually valid let's go look for prior art that we know the patent office missed a bunch of stuff so there's a good chance this is going to get resolved in litigation in the opposite direction there's a lot of uncertainty in the system now because of the lack of the foundation I would say at the front end I would say that some litigation is good and definitely getting the value of your patents is really important but you want to make sure that that right that you have in your hand is actually solid I think just on the front end to the extent you are thinking about patenting as a small company you don't have a lot of money necessarily to invest in a huge portfolio so what makes you unique is you want to make sure you're getting bang for your buck with the money that you are investing in a patent and so doing a thorough search that would include the archive and the resources that came before to make sure that whatever you are if and when the patent protection of your ideas that you are scoping them properly I think at the front end from your own patent owner perspective it's really important to be able to do that as well so I think that's another benefit to small companies it's simply to understand what came before and make sure you can learn from it but you can also make sure that your patent rights are scoped in view of it so sorry I don't mean to monopolize the time I guess I just want to clarify a question maybe to get some more information because you know cannot even afford a $3,000 laser printer for example and to get a patent probably need at least 10k or so and so when I see this it's amazing because it's free it is accessible but I wonder if it sets up this dynamic that like you know individuals give their prior art in the form of not patents where these big companies can still afford to participate in the patent system and I was wondering if you could speak a bit to that aspect of accessibility well I think that one idea you're putting your technology into the prior art archive and you're also out there producing it so putting it there though will reduce the chance in theory that someone else will try to patent it so the idea that Joy was talking about before where there was the circuit board or I guess paper based LED technology that was developed here but then somebody else patented again if we had had that information in the archive the examiner at the time of the application saw that there was that information there they would not issue those patents so the hope is that by putting it in there you will gain more freedom of action oh okay that sounds so interesting patent their work and we view this as a great tool for those people as well in fact that's part of my main interest in the project is supporting people like you so we are very much hoping that we can make it accessible to everyone and that we can encourage people to use it and we would love to also have conversations with you about how to best go about doing that thank you thank you for your work Sam Zellner with AT&T and Dan I want to thank you for what you put together here it's really a great thing and sort of building off of what you just mentioned there we've talked a lot about the patent office and what the examiners need to do and how they need to improve and all that and I feel for the patent office everybody wants to make them a whipping boy for everything but I think the prior archive also helps the inventors quite a bit whether it's a corporation like AT&T or an individual inventor because nobody wants to waste their money filing a patent that's going to get rejected right away and so this provides additional information so you can see what's out there and it's making it available to everyone sort of a next step to this in my mind and the patent office does it today but as they advance their tools the patent office makes their search tool available to people it's a little bit hard right now because it's only limited to university some special university libraries have access to a terminal that you have to go to but I'm sure in the future it'll be expanded out so as they improve their tools and things it'll be available for everyone so then with this archive they can do better prior art searches so that they won't you know inventors won't waste their money and actually it will save the patent office time too because those filings won't be put in taking up examiners time you just reject it so I think there's a number of things coming together that are very important here was there any comment on that before I ask another question well so for those of you who don't know me among other things I had the intellectual property committee at the media labs I work closely with Kate on these issues but also in another part of my life I've had occasion to testify in IPRs in district court and at the ITC and other lovely places like that and there's a kind of prior art that is used a whole lot and it doesn't come from Google scholar it actually comes from eBay you know where I've been involved in any number of cases where somebody bought a thing on eBay to get its manual you know and that was used as a very important piece of prior art in a patent case and so one thing I would encourage people in industry to think about is what documentation associated with your products you know that would be useful as prior art you would want to archive and what's your process for doing that and it may not be just the manual that comes with the thing it may have to be the repair manual or it may be something else as well so just wanted to flag that as a piece a kind of prior art that we haven't talked about but that turns out at least in my experience to be quite important in patent cases so thank you everyone we are about to go to lunch so I will make this very brief and I'm hoping that we can continue these conversations over some food I just wanted to thank Director Yanqu and the USPTO and thank Cisco and MIT and Google and everyone who's worked on this project and oh that was the cube my goodness and I wanted to thank all of you for your support I'm really excited I hope that more people and institutions join us in contributing to this archive and making it better and stronger and I'm very much looking forward to a future companies share their technical documentation or their eBay manuals and where inventors like G are enabled to share their work without needing to fear bad patents being issued so thank you all very much and please enjoy lunch