INNOVATION

in any way or use them commercially.
Best application if your tech (or authored content)
is designed for:
• Community building. While your
tech has immediate value for your
customers, by opening up your works
for modification, customer complaints,
wishes and observations are shared
back to you in evolutionary steps.
This provides a means to redistribute
the best modifications back to
your community of customers with
economies-of-scale savings in production—providing
the convenience of
rapid improvement for them, while
maintaining stewardship and control of
feature development of your creation.
• Portfolio sharing. If your content/
invention has a function that materially
helps in the research or content
creation of related materials, then a
portfolio of related tech is gathered
under a mutually shared contract
amongst content providers/patent
holders.
• Controlled distribution of content.
As the original author/creator, you
control how much of the value proposition
you capture of your original
and derived works. With the least
restrictive license, you ensure that
you are properly attributed for your
inspiration and hard work. At its most
restrictive, you as the license/patent
holder determine who can charge,
who can distribute and how much
modification of your work you will
allow.
Successful examples: Tesla Motors battery
patents, Mercedes Benz safety patents, blogs,
videos, digital articles, Twitter, Vine, Facebook
“sharing.”
If you want to increase distribution of
your works, this strategy allows for rerelease,
modification and commercialization under
licenses that you specify. Yes, this strategy
includes any content you wish to go “viral.”
TRADITIONAL
PATENT/COPYRIGHT:
As stated earlier, patent filing procedure and
rights have recently changed, whereas copyright
is as it’s always been.
“First to File”: Ever notice how inspiration
has a tendency to strike multiple inventors
at relatively the same time? If we all
played fair, the argument would hold that the
basic building blocks igniting that inspiration
may have been present for all the inventors.
If we all played fair.
No longer can you mail your idea to yourself as sufficient proof
that you thought of it first. In order to patent your inspiration, you
must be the first applicant to successfully demonstrate that your invention
is:
1. Statutory—not electromagnetic signals or forms of energy;
not music, literary works or compilations of data; and not
data structures or programs;
2. Novel/new—not known to the public before it was invented;
not described in a publication more than one year prior to
patent filing; and not used publicly or for sale to the public
more than one year prior to patent filing;
3. Useful—the invention must be able to perform the task
described in the patent application; and
4. Non-obvious—the innovation cannot be an obvious
improvement of a prior device by a person skilled in the field
of application. For example, a contractor would recognize
that a Phillips screwdriver with a longer shaft to reach a
more distant screw is an obvious improvement based on the
current Phillips screwdriver.
Copyright is an automatic protection upon finishing and publishing
your work that protects from unauthorized reproduction for the life
of the author plus a categorized number of years, a minimum statute
of 25 years. But if you, the author, truly want to cross your “t” and dot
your “i,” you’d best register your finished work with the U.S. Copyright
Office.
But coders beware: ideas and formulas are not copyrightable! If
you write a program in one language, it’s true that no one can legally
copy your code for their own purposes without your permission.
However, anyone can write a similar program in another language to
attain the same functionality.
Once upon a time, one particular program language had the
best functionality features for a particular device; this was Apple’s
early thesis that Microsoft is slowly adopting—albeit a little too late
to matter. But as computing power, storage and networkability gets
faster and better, the barrier of “best language” is quickly fading from
distinct first-mover advantage!
A CONCLUSION
Hopefully, this primer has got you thinking about how to protect the
value of your work. As much as I’d like it to be thorough, however, it
would surely be better deemed as “food for thought”—a starting point
for researching your best options. The best advice is that which comes
from a licensed professional with an educational and professional
background in your area of interest—whose time you paid for. Unfortunately,
there is a startling lack of IP attorneys in Peoria, particularly
when there is so much hype about the economic impact of innovation.
You can count on one hand the number of IP attorneys in Peoria who
are free to take walk-in clients. What are the chances they’ve defended
your particular type of IP, let alone successfully?
If you are looking to commercialize your work, seek the absolute
best counsel you can find—even if it means heading to New York City
(ad/enterprise-tech, fintech, cleantech) San Francisco (software), London
(fintech) or Boston (hardware, biotech). If you can’t afford to see
the best, at least go to St. Louis or Chicago to find an IP lawyer with a
degree in your particular field of interest.
Innovation is only possible if your creation—your expression
of tech—is legally shielded to defend itself in the (non-)commercial
wild.
Clint LeClair, MD is founding president of River City Labs, NFP and founder
of Protogro, a local biotech incubator.
90 InterBusiness Issues -- January 2016