Pop Question: What is an Innovator’s Patent Agreement? (The 'Defensive' Only Patent)

About a month ago, on May 21st 2013, something *really* cool happened. Not only did Pull-to-Refresh get granted a patent, it was done so by Twitter using their new Innovator's Patent Agreement (IPA). (If you've read my previous post (June 18th) on Creative Commons, you could almost think that this is CC for Patents.) 

Hopefully you already know about the PTR control created by Loren Britcher, of Tweetie fame. Britcher, who I believe now is working with Facebook, was very clear he wasn't a fan of the patent system. One of his quote is:

 "I have plenty of feelings about the patent system and how broken it is," (from here)

I can understand his frustration. I remember quite well how shocked I was when NTP sued Canadian mobility icon RIM (now Blackberry) and they had to settle for $612 million in 2006. If you didn't know, NTP is *purely* a patent holding company. They don't actually create anything. Wikipedia has them noted as a 'Patent Troll'. Clearly, they were not doing this 'defensively'. Even more recently, many believe that a main factor of Google purchasing Motorola was to acquire more patents to 'defend' itself.

A refreshing sight is seeing that legal director Benjamin Lee and the rest of counsel @ Twitter did their best impression of Ghandi to "..be the change that you wish to see in the world". You can actually read the entire IPA agreement @ Git Hub here. It seems some may have been critical of Lee & Twitter's first attempt. I am not a lawyer and my experience with patents is limited to being involved in a few patents applications many years ago, but as a 'layman', I think the 'spirit' of the agreement is very inspiring:

The Company, on behalf of itself and its successors, transferees, and assignees (collectively the “Assignee”), agrees not to assert any claims of any Patents which may be granted on any of the above applications unless asserted for a Defensive Purpose. (Section 2 of IPA @ GitHub)

There is some 'wiggle' room in agreement, but it takes agreement from all the engineers to really step out-of-bounds for non-defensive action:

If Assignee needs to assert any of the Patent claims against any Entity for other than a Defensive Purpose, Assignees must obtain prior written permission from all of the Inventors without additional consideration or threat.(Section 2 of IPA @ GitHub)

Overall, if quoted correctly, I think Britcher said very it well here:

"I really hope this becomes the de facto standard for hiring — engineers could demand this in their contracts."

"If other people can't use pull-to-refresh, they can never build on top of it either." He says other developers shouldn't worry about using pull-to-refresh in their apps. "Twitter and I see eye-to-eye on the patent system." (from here)

Being somewhat realistic, I think the IPA has hope to be at least as transformative as the Creative Commons license. Being even more optimistic, the IPA (or a future derivative) may have an even more influential role, maybe even comparable to Open Source movement, because while the CC has bred many derivative (or incremental) innovations, having open patents could help drive disruptive innovation and remove some of the hurdles created today by the over-patenting of ideas. 

The following is a quote from VOX research:

This evidence shows that, at least on average, patents block cumulative innovation. (from here) 

Even more famously, Mark Cuban got a rant here as well. However you can pretty much summarize his view with this response:

Because dumbass patents are crushing small businesses. I have had multiple small companies i am an investor in have to fight or pay trolls for patents that were patently ridiculous. There is no place for software patents and most tech patents are not original in the first place. They are merely “remixes” of early technology.

(To be clear, Mark Cuban is talking about patents which shouldn't have been granted in the first place. I don't think PTR is in 'that' bucket.)

Any inventors or lawyers want to 'weigh' in? Hope that helps...

Wayne Pau.

p.s. What's almost just as *cool* is that IPA agreement from Twitter was posted on GitHub with CC license. So you can literally say that the IPA 'leverages' CC. ;)

(https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement)

Pop Question: What is Creative Commons License? (Jonathan Coulton's Code Monkey song...)

Have you ever seen this icon on a few pages, but have been curious what it means? Well, it's Create Commons licensing options.

I first learnt about the CC license with the 'World of Warcraft' version of Jonathan Coulton's Code Monkey song. It's got some great lines (for *geeky* coders like myself):

Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink
His code not "functional" or "elegant"
What do Code Monkey think?
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA)

If you don't know Coulton, he left a job @ NYC small tech company Cluen to work on music full-time. However, even more than his music, I believe he will be remembered for his backing of the Creative Commons ideal.

Gah! Creative Commons, DRM, blah blah blah. I will give Jonathan Coulton $100 if he will keep his mouth shut for five minutes.

I know, I know. All I can say is that Creative Commons is the most powerful idea I’ve heard since they told me there was going to be a sequel to Star Wars. Everyone in the world should read Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture. I saw him speak about CC at PopTech 2003 and I was so excited by it that I nearly wet my pants. The things he says make so much sense, and yet they’re so counter to the current thinking about intellectual property – it makes you want to, well, wet your pants.

(http://www.jonathancoulton.com/faq/) 

So how does it work? Basically you go to this page: http://creativecommons.org/choose/ and select one of options. You can choose to allow others to modify your work and if you allow commercial use of the work, etc.

*IF* you are at all a fan of SCRUM, you likely know the 'god-father' of SCRUM methodology Mike Cohn and his company Mountain Goat Software. He puts his basic SCRUM methodology PPT on his website FREE for use via the CC licensing model here:

http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum/a-reusable-scrum-presentation

(I myself @ SAP have used a 'modified' version of his presentation to help educate team members on SCRUM. I *highly* condensed the deck into roughly a 10-min, 15 slide presentation, but it was invaluable not having to start from scratch.)

I do believe in the power of CC license. In today's world, I believe older copyright laws are becoming quickly outdated. A good example is the backlash that Metallica got when they sued Napster and basically fans. (Ironic because my favourite version of any of their songs is actually a re-make by cello group Apocalyptica, see here. This doesn't get made without creative licensing...)

Maybe it's the culture I grew up in, but I strongly believe that 're-mixing' something is an art in of itself. I see 'this' every time my daughter watches the Sesame Street remake of (Canadian) Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe', called 'Share it Maybe' with Cookie Monster. (This remake has over 14 million views and counting and I'm sure my daughter single handily contributed hundreds of downloads to this #). Linkin Park's album Re-Animation is nothing but 3rd party re-mixes of their songs.

The internet has been great for knowledge sharing, but even greater has been the power of collaboration. The flexibility of the CC licensing is very powerful. If you like the work they have done, feel free to donate to the CC cause. This pie-chart shows you how they use your donations to help further the power of sharing and remixing:

You can find more about donating on their website here.

Thinking of producing some original material soon? Thinking about what type of licensing to use? Maybe you can consider the CC license.

Hope that helps...

Wayne Pau.