A Patent War is Coming...
Jedediah G
EU Top 200 Fintech Expert | EU Top 100 Blockchain Expert | x-Stripe | x-NATO | Inventor, product owner, SDLC engineer, compliance and risk | Wine-Ku | Investor | Independent Director & Advisor
Technology comes in waves. The first internet wave was from 1995 to 2005 and encompassed web publishing and e-mail communication. Towards the end of the wave, we saw the first massive patent war around 2002 between Netscape, Microsoft, AOL and others. This was a natural progression as technology matured, patents were granted and the shake out of the weak patents and underfunded players cleared the marketplace.
The second wave was from 2005 to 2015 and consisted of mobile always on connectivity as we moved from flip phones to smartphones running internet communications and packing the power of a 2005 supercomputer into our pockets. Like the prior wave, the end of this wave concluded with the second massive patent war between Samsung, Apple, HTC and others that peaked in 2012.
The next wave of truly revolutionary technology is blockchain and cryptography powered. This is happening from 2015 to 2025. I expect that we will see a massive blockchain patent war around 2022. Several companies have been silently preparing for this. Peer Mountain is no exception.
For Peerchain, the cross-blockchain protocol that powers Peer Mountain, I filed a patent on the overall technology before we took Peer Mountain out of stealth. That’s not all, I filed an IPBox with the Benelux IP Office on the Peerchain architecture way back in 2015.
Several people say that they don’t like the fact that Peer Mountain has a patent involved in the project. Their claim is that this goes against the open, decentralized spirit of the crypto and blockchain movement. I disagree and believe that many projects are in for a rude awakening in the coming years.
The main reason for filing the patent is to maintain and protect the Peerchain protocol. You see, there are several big name companies and smaller ones, such as nChain which is small but notorious, that are busily filing hundreds of patents on blockchain technology today. These patent trolls in waiting are going to cause massive misery to projects that could be deemed as infringing on these eventual patents. This means that many well intentioned projects with good technology may disappear because nChain or some other patent troll with ample resources will file a suit against them. nChain has made their intent quite clear in this respect and is patenting to prevent others from using technology that they wish to have exclusively in Bitcoin Cash. This will deplete the resources of many good projects and cause them to pivot or fail entirely.
I find that the best protection against patent trolls is to have established prior art, hence the 2015 filing, and to have a patent that makes it clear that our technology is not subject to any other patent. The Peerchain patent filing is designed to protect the future of the Peer Mountain ecosystem and ensure that we do not fall victim to patent trolls.
A second reason for filing the patent is that we intend to push Peerchain as a standard protocol, this may include submission as as an RFC to the IETF, contribution to the Apache Foundation, or a similar method of ensuring the long term maintenance of the Peerchain protocol, independent of Peer Mountain the company. This is a long a difficult process and having a patent in place will give material value to the contribution that we will eventually make to the independent body that will steward our protocol in the future.
In summary, the risk of not patenting the protocol are so great and the cost of patenting so small in the big picture, that only a fool would move a project such as Peer Mountain forward in the hopes that no patent troll or standards manipulating big-tech firm will have any interest in attacking a project with this potential once it gains significant ground.
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Making the intangible tangible! - IPM Consultant and Patent Attorney -Tangible IP
5yThe strategy is fundamentally flawed unless no further innovation is possible on Peerchain technology. Filing a single patent does not secure FTO.
Global Executive Leader of Innovation, Technology & Intellectual Property
5y1. Possible that AI and NN will be the next wave instead of blockchain. 2. Nevertheless, there is even a question there can be a patent war in the US as long as there is PTAB. 3. Good thing there are likely no design patents in play :-)
In the patent filings, there needs to be consideration for how at least the US patent office will consider blockchain patents. One of the landmines for these type of patents is whether or not the applications cover what is patentable subject matter (35 U.S.C. 101) as defined by the Patent Office and the Courts. Many software based inventions have been invalidated as not being patentable subject matter under this (the patents are abstract and are not tangible, see articles regarding Alice v. CLS Bank). Also, having prosecuted many patents in the security space, how are you going to prove infringement? You should be asking your counsel, " If this patent grants, how would one be able to show it is being used by a 3rd party via the granted claims?" Lastly, make sure that your claims cover "one infringer". If your patent claims require both a customer and a remote server to do something, your claims may not be infringed. Seriously, talk to your patent counsel about these points while you are filing and prosecuting your patent applications.
Executive Director @ The Outlier Project | Operations Leader | Dad x 4 | Docent
5yGreat article, I think another chapter of the next patent war is the onslaught of 3D printing.
Skeptical Empiricist, Reinvention Capitalist, IP Troublemaker.
5yI wonder if any of the blockchain patents will withstand IPR. More likely than a “patent troll” is a competitive challenge from another OpCo wherein patent challenge is an integral part of the business strategy (as it should be).