Hi Brian and Adam,
I am sorry that I haven't responded sooner and thanks for the plug in your MasterCard Article. We are still a very young organization attempting to take on a huge problem. This is my team’s first community-benefit non-profit and we are stumbling through the process one issue at a time.
I am sorry for the long post below. I have tried to go through each of the issues presented earlier in this thread.
Transparency
Your concern about transparency is valid and something we have been hearing a lot. We have taken some steps to increase transparency like removing WHOISguard protection and adding a page introducing our team. Our founders are Reed Jessen (me) and Jordan Williams. Eric Bandholz just joined our Board of Director's last week. Jordan and I work together in our day jobs as patent analysts at an intellectual property law firm. Eric is the Founder of BeardBrand.com, an online retail company. The three of us are members of the Spokane Society of Libertarian Entrepreneurs in Spokane, WA. Our resumes are on offered on LinkedIn and can be accessed through our "Team" Page on our website.
If there are more transparency enhancing actions we should take, please let me know.
@bcohen, if you need a IP professional to give you insight for your stories or want to know more about The Cryptocurrency Defense Foundation, I am always available to help. You can contact me at [email protected].
Our current status
We are still very much in startup phase and must admit that we got a lot more attention a lot earlier that we expected. On one hand, this is a great thing because it suggests to us that our work might be accepted and useful to the cryptoeconomy. On the other hand we are playing catch-up in all sorts of ways. For example, as of the writing of this post our non-profit organization registration is still not visible on the Washington State Secretary of State website. This is our first priority and we won’t be taking an overt action until this registration is publicly available for anyone to see.
Once we are a registered organization, we would like to begin an open dialog with the Bitcoin Foundation as well as other Altcoin groups to see how we can serve the community. Bitcoin, Altcoins, and distributed applications like Etherium and MaidSafe all share a common interest when it comes to the topic of intellectual property. We would like The Cryptocurrency Defense Foundation to be a central nexus of IP strength and information.
We have not been actively soliciting tips/donations from the community until or paper work in squared away. We are funding everything ourselves currently. After we are officially a registered non-profit organization in the State of Washington, We hope to run a donation campaign in order to raise funds to move our work forward. If any of you have ideas about how to best do this, please reach out to me.
Are there any patents currently know that may be a risk to bitcoin and any of the altcoins?
@shemnon
As you know, there are a bunch of recent patent applications which describe “bitcoin” or altcoins in their specifications. These are important to track but I don’t think they are the current threat. The real threat is patents on electronic currency transmission dating back before the advent of Bitcoin. For example, Denso’s seminal patent from 1999 on QR codes might be used to tax or retard nearly the entire cryptoeconomy. QR codes, while maybe not the future of bitcoin, are how most people interact with bitcoin in the physical world today. https://www.google.com/patents/US6267296.
My team and I have put together a list of patents which we think are potentially dangerous to the cryptoeconomy if they get into the wrong hands. Once our non-profit paperwork is public, we intend to reach out to these patent owners and discuss a patent pooling arrangement. We are also not opposed to purchasing particularly worrisome patents if the need arises.
There are also non-patent intellectual property threats to the cryptoeconomy. The recent dust up about the two Dogecoin trademark applications is a perfect example of real threats that we will be able to deal with given enough community support. Moolah has said that they intend to file an opposition action to the trademark and we think it should be a simple thing for them to do. We are watching the situation closely though and if they drop the ball, our lawyers are ready to go to work to make sure no one trademarks the term Doge for any reason. It belongs to the community and should stay that way. The whole project should only cost between $1500-$2000 to kill the applications in their tracks.
Would you have recommended that they file? Or would you recommend against filing?
We do strongly recommend that companies file patents on their innovative work. Patents give their owner a seat at the negotiating table and the leverage to ensure that their interests are taking into account. Actively choosing not to patent is an choice to have less negotiating power and we feel this is irresponsible in cutthroat environment like electronic payments.
Some have a moral aversion to patents because of their nature as a State-granted monopoly on an idea backed by violence. I understand this position and may sympathize with it in certain situations. Jordan and I have a libertarian orientation and Eric is dyed-in-the-wool AnCap. We are also pragmatists. Alternatives to patenting, like defensive publication, merely disallow the competition from patenting your inventive step. They don’t, however, stop your competitors from getting their own patents and enforcing them against you. It gives you no economic leverage and allows others to exclude you from the negotiating table.
The battle for the future of the world economy has already started. And, whether people realize it or not, it is a hyper competitive battle to the death between two competing economic structures (Fiat vs. Trustless). We need to make sure we don’t bring a knife to the gun fight.
... but assign it to your organization?
Our intention is to acquire a large enough patent portfolio to be a credible deterrent to patent suppression of the cryptoeconomy. We do ask that individuals and companies assign their patent assets to our holding company where they will be licensed openly to anyone who agrees not to use their patents against other licensees. It’s like a big umbrella of protection. Inside the umbrella, everyone competes on quality, service, and price. If you choose to threaten one of our members inside the umbrella, we will use all resources at our disposal to make the cost of your supression many times larger than the benefits of doing so. (Patent infringement suits, Inter Partes Reexamination, Amicus Briefs in support of defendants, financial support for defendants, cross-case information sharing, etc.). Linux’s Open Invention Network (OIN) is the model we are following. They won a few key battles in 2006-2007 and now open-source Linux-based Operating Systems are on almost half of the worlds mobile devices. I have written about OIN a bit more indepth in my recent article in Crypto Biz Magazine. http://cryptobizmagazine.com/bitcoin-suppression-via-the-patent-system/
A few of the companies we have spoken to are apprehensive about assigning their patents to us because, although they share our vision of a open cryptoeconomy, they worry that their investors would be displeased by giving up the immense value stored in the patent assets. We are legal structures to accommodate those that want to participate but maintain ownership of their patent assets.
There are a few problems associated with Agreement-but-no-Assignment defensive patent regimes.
- Fiduciary Duty- Corporate executives have an fiduciary obligation to do what is best for their shareholders. They can be held liable if they don’t attempt to optimize shareholder profits. One could imagine situations in which a CEO is faced with the difficult decision of selling a patent asset to a patent troll in order to keep the company afloat. Regardless of the CEO’s personal feelings a goodwill she feels towards the bitcoin community, she may be forced to sell the patent or personally face legal problems.
- Bankruptcy- When companies go bankrupt, as many startups do, their assets are often sold off at auction in order to payoff the companies liabilities. The company owners have little control over who buys the patents and the assets simply go to the highest bidder. The more damaging and dangerous a patent might be to the bitcoin economy, the higher the sale price at auction. When the prices get high enough, only companies with well-defined monetization strategies (Patent Trolls) will be able to rationally afford the patents. No matter what the owners say about their desire to see an open bitcoin economy, the bankruptcy court will likely sell the very best patents to patent trolls.
- Maintenance- Patent portfolios are not cheap to maintain. Patent owners must pay periodic “maintenance fees” to the government in order to keep their patents in effect. In the US, these costs are ~$12,000 over the life of the patent and may be more in other countries. Because the value of most patents cannot be accounted for on a traditional revenue line, patent maintenance fees are often the first cost to be cut when a company falls on hard times. The patents are abandoned and the leverage that they offered the company and the community is lost.
We are attempting to develop a legal framework to mitigate these risks but we know the best way to avoid them altogether is by having the assets assigned directly to a public interest non-profit charity like The Cryptocurrency Defense Foundation.
Also can you find / point me to the actual filing? I checked PAIR etc. and I could not find the filing.
You can download a PDF of the patent application from Google Patents. It is an awesome resource and much better than the USPTO. https://www.google.com/patents/US20140172633
Will you be contacting or have you contacted CoinSigner?
I haven’t heard of CoinSigner before your post but they look awesome. I can imagine all sorts of uses for their platform (donations verifications, patent transactions, patent licenses, etc.). I think that The Cryptocurrency Defense Foundation might useful in the mediation of IP-related disputes.
I will reach out to them. If any of you all, know the CoinSigner team, you might introduce us?
