The Open Patent is a global campaign to bring to life a new kind of patent.
Our goal: to accelerate the diffusion of climate and health innovations at scale, while funding those who share their breakthroughs.
The project is currently in development and open to collaborations.
If you want to support the campaign or stay updated with its progress, sign up below:
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- 97% of patent holders lose money*
- Patents slow down new improvements on an idea and its equitable distribution for 20 years
- Patent don’t guarantee success, just the right to sue for years of trials
- Patents don’t protect inventors from those who have more money than them
- Patents make it hard to recombine ideas
We propose to build an open patent system that dramatically increases an innovation’s chances of success, accelerates the pace at which it spreads, and takes away the risks of innovating.
The goal is enabling innovation where it’s needed without any barrier, while rewarding those who work and fund new breakthroughs.
Global and universal access to covid-19 vaccines, and any other medicine, is a public health and humanitarian imperative. For that we need a patent system that helps accelerate the pace at which health solutions can be developed and spread.
To cut global emissions, we need to overhaul in 30 years a global fossil fuels infrastructure that took 250 years to build.
Imagine if we could completely replace polluting materials like plastic packaging with new compostable materials like Ecovative’s patented mushroom packaging.
It still rewards innovations that can prove novelty, usefulness, and non-obviousness.
But it goes back to the origin of the patent's spirit, covering technical descriptions and not the broadest set of applications.
And it also facilitates the necessary information to let others reproduce the technology (e.g., Bill of Materials, Design Files, Step by Step Instructions, Open License...)
Opening access to a new innovation enables patents to benefit from Network Effects. The more people use it, the better it works, and the more valuable it becomes as more people can contribute and improve the original innovation. The more someone starts manufacturing and distributing your invention without your permission, the more revenues they generate thanks to your own open patent.
Lowered risks and Increased chances of innovations forming new markets enable new taxes to be created.
The state collects a tax on the new revenues generated by the copycats, whether by taking a VAT, a corporate income tax, or any other tax the involved country collects.
The royalty for the open patent holder comes from the ecosystem’s revenue enabled by the open patent.
This is similar to how Collective Rights Management organizations (CRO) have collected royalties for musicians, except that there is no added royalty to the price of the product sold.
Your innovation creates new opportunities for the market.
Since copycats can’t be sued for copying you, they no longer dodge your patent.
Their price doesn't increase because there is no added royalty to be paid out of their pocket.
And this enables them to manufacture and distribute your idea to create new revenues that didn’t exist before.
Everybody has an incentive to work together instead of “against” each other.
An alternative for those seeking a patent system that can fund them without sueing others.
This open patent can be an innovative solution that still works within the framework of today's patent environment.
Those who want to keep their current patents can. And those who don't want to file a patent, or those not finding ways to commercialize their patents profitably, can use this open patent to grant permission for others to use their idea.
Competitors become collaborators.
The more the idea is copied by competitors, and the more revenues they generate, the more the open patent holder is rewarded.
An Open Patent rewards its creators.
Unlike patents, where being copied doesn’t pay back, when an ecosystem generates revenues from an open patent innovation, it also generates royalties for its creator.
Simplify how your innovation scales.
You become free of many of the costs of commercializing an innovation.
You go from the constraints of setting up and scaling a company to orchestrating an ecosystem of collaborators.
More taxes and jobs.
Low-IP markets mature faster by lowering their costs and risks of development, but also by increasing the opportunities available for every actor in the ecosystem.
All of this put together increases the equitable chances to spread revenue opportunities, job creation, and taxes for states.
A way to recoup its investmensts in R&D and reinvest in more of it.
The state funds high-risk research.
Instead of the profits being fully privatized from the State through closed patents, the open patent creates a new channel through which the state can recoup its investments.
The more State-funded research succeeds, the more funding comes back.
Many players instead of “Too big to fail” companies.
Having a larger ecosystem of smaller companies instead of a big monopoly lowers tax evasion and increases regional sovereignty.
Instead of getting big unicorn companies with outsized global power, an open patent system enables unicorn ecosystems formed by hundreds of smaller companies. This prevents the creation of “too big to fail” companies and more resilient and healthy markets.
Lower costs and risks for patent holders and investors.
Patent holders no longer have to worry about taking an idea to market, hiring and managing employees, finding distribution channels, or setting up manufacturing plants.
When they get copied, the royalty gives them the funding and income needed to keep researching, refining their invention, and reinforcing their ecosystem.
Higher chances of success and recouping R&D investments : From betting on one to betting on thousands.
Relying on a single startup or organisation to find how to make a new idea work has 10% of chances of succeeding.
Inviting thousands of actors to bring
the innovation to market and adapt it to the local needs increases exponentially its success chances.
If a company fails, since innovation is open, anyone can pick it back from where it left.
Get innovation at lower prices, better quality and greater availablity.
Instead of having abusive prices set by a monopoly incentivized to maximize profits, more suppliers, greater diversity and more competition drive prices to be adjusted to the quality of supply and demand.
This frees the market from depending on a single provider who might make abusive use of his or her patent rights to hike up the prices so much that it only becomes affordable for a few.
No lock-in and no planned obsolescence.
The fact that anyone can build on top of an open patent gives everyone access to new possibilities that weren't imaginable before.
If a provider wants to lower the quality of a product or shorten its lifespan, other players can create more durable alternatives.
More opportunities for the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.
If you are a company, entrepreneur or non-profit, you get access to innovations that would otherwise be closed, and you can collaborate with other actors to develop it faster and with lower R&D costs.
You can solve new problems as soon as new solutions emerge.
As we find new solutions to large scale problems, they can be quickly integrated and deployed into your organization.
You don’t risk getting sued for using an innovation.
Organizations are no longer disincentivized to use a new idea.
Patent trolls or competing companies can’t sue you to stop you from using a new innovation that can benefit your company or market.
We’re on a mission to open up innovation to accelerate the diffusion of climate and health solutions at scale, while funding those who share their breakthroughs.
Sign up to join a global movement of people working together to bring to life a patent that serves the common good.
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Who made this?
I did, Jaime Arredondo, from Bold and Open, with the invaluable collaboration, encouragement and contributions from Tiberius Brastaviceanu, Martin Hauer, Diderik van Wingerden, Gabriel Plassat, Albert Cañigueral, Taoufik Vallipuram, Javi Creus, Françoise Hontoy, Cesar Garcia, Lars Zimmermann, Christian Villum, Walter Bouvais, Pascale Guiffant, Sylvain Mauger, Baptiste Dupas, Benjamin Jean, Matti Schneider, Seth Godin, Charlelie Jourdan, Adrien Schaller, Pierre Pezziardi, Peter Troxler Adriana Sanz Mirabal and Marie-Anne Bernasconi.
Why did you make this?
Since I started looking for solutions that could help weather the climate and health crises, I have been amazed at how complex and risky it has been to collaborate to spread them. Imagine if we replaced all plastic packaging with mushroom packaging that is compostable. Imagine if we used the latest technology to save 70% of water consumption on all new infrastructures. It is time to make it easy for such innovations to spread freely and fund research to accelerate this movement.
How could it get started?
For the moment, this is an abstract solution that holds potential. Describing a bold idea and running it are different things. So this project needs dedicated leaders ready to commit something for the long haul. So I'm publishing the idea here, creating a space where leaders can meet and collaborate, and hoping that many will copy, improve and make it work far beyond what I've imagined here.
To trial this experiment, a first test could invite 100 patent holders already making money but are not profitable yet, to share their idea as an open patent.
To accelerate the future of innovations able to tackle the climate and health crisis, we’d prioritize technologies that can accelerate the future of sectors that need to grow, like Renewable energy, no-emissions transportation, or regenerative agriculture.
The test could run for five years at least to understand how to best make it work. If there are early encouraging signs, it can scale earlier. But stopping before five years or more is not enough to give organizations time to get their ideas out, find their communities and for their market ecosystems to take shape.
This is just an example of what a possible plan would look like. I'm sure you have better ones worth trying.
Should we exclude any innovation from becoming open patents?
If the purpose of this patent is to help solve the climate change problem, it can't be available to technologies that support fossil fuel extraction or other extractive processes.
When will it be ready?
It totally depends if states and organizations see interest in it. So the more people show their support, the sooner states, intellectual property offices and innovators can start working on it.
Are there similar models already working?
Collective Right Management Organisations (CROs) already collect payments of artists' rights in the music industry and distribute the original songwriters, composers, and music publishers' rights. For example, in 2019, the french CRO managed 2.4 million deposited creations, collected almost 1.5 billion euros, and redistributed 1.3 billion euros to its members. There are equivalents to this organization in the film industry based on intellectual property and in many other countries worldwide.
And since CROs concentrate lots of power, it's essential to plan adequate transparency and accountability oversight to prevent them from abusing their power, as with any other public institution responsible for handling public money.
Would it be profitable?
Easily. For researchers, funders and states. The open patent works like an open marketplace for innovation. Third-party companies can build new markets on top of existing innovations much faster and wider than a patent holder could.
According to the current available evidence, incentivizing innovation to be distributed openly would generate way more than it would cost:
- The European Commission found that investing 1€ billion in open source contributed between 60 to 95€ billions to the European Union’s GDP. That's a 60 to 95x multiplier.
- Low IP industries have exponentially larger revenues than high IP industries. (Source: Lessons from fashion's free culture at 12:06)
Wouldn’t it be too expensive to track who reuses and commercializes an open patent?
It won't be cheap, but research and current open markets strongly suggest it will bring more value than it will cost. (Sources: e.g., here and here)
Under-funded open technologies or public research are already enabling markets that wouldn't be possible without them (e.g. Linux, WordPress, Risc-V…). So investing in giving the means to the creators of collectively available technologies is an investment that will pay for itself, both economically and ecologically, by providing the means to create and maintain new markets that aren't possible otherwise.
To prevent the ballooning costs of tracking useless patents, an open patent applicant should prove it is already commercially distributed before any open patent office tracks it.
This way, the organizations responsible for tracking know what to track, how to track it and avoid tracking useless patents that don’t have any financial viability.
To get a proxy of the magnitude of how much it can cost, a CRO like the SACEM directs 85% of the revenues it collects to its creators, costing around 15% of the revenues it collects in operational costs.
If Europe or any other region starts an open patent system, won't other regions take advantage without giving back?
This regional copying is already happening, and patents haven’t stopped regions from copying each other. If we take history as a predictor of what can happen, their communities always end up ahead when open-source projects build the proper network effect. A regional network effect can out cooperate any regional competition that copies its ideas.
Open technology transfers are beneficial for everyone by turning competitors into allies. So collaborating to develop international agreements to make an open patent system work on a global scale would be in everyone's best interest.
What happens when new products depend on multiple open patents? How do we redistribute the value they generate between them?
This value distribution also has to be polished, but we can also draw inspiration from how patent pool or CROs distribute royalties. The open patent collectors can gather periodically to organize commissions to determine a fair remuneration formula for different open patents.
Is this Open Patent idea new?
When I first started drafting this project, I thought so, but as my friend Martin Hauer pointed out, Adrian Bowyer, RepRap's founder, had already thought about it in 2011 and called it a Free Patent. I've enriched this proposal with some of his ideas. Here's his article about it.
How can I help?
After you’ve shared it with your friends, joined the mailing list, we need a core team of passionate individuals who can offer guidance, advice, thoughts, and some time to hone and turn this idea into reality. Tell anyone who could be interested in this kind of patent to get in touch.
These could be entrepreneurs, innovators, IP lawyers, policymakers, lobbyists, lawmakers, politicians, public servants, CEOs, researchers, investors, patent-holders, or anyone else who could be interested in this kind of patent for their projects.
You can also participate in the Forum, share your interest and explore the possibilities to collaborate and advance this new Open Patent idea.
Can I stay updated?
Follow us by joining our mailing list and Twitter for the latest updates on the project.
Is this idea Copyrighted?
No. If you want to set up this open patent on your own; please do. The sooner the better. We would appreciate it if you would keep us updated though, we might have some ideas for it!
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