IP Industry from a Technologist’s Perspective
eGeorge Koomullil
Intellectual Property (IP) has gone through various ups and downs in the past couple of decades. IP evokes varying perceptions and emotions from different individuals. While some see it as instrumental in the progress of humanity others hold the opposite view that its enforcement excludes a large number of people to benefit from new ideas and inventions. Here is a high-level view of the IP industry, with the details eliminated to focus on major possibilities.
There are many factors and events that have molded the IP industry in the recent past. Here are a few that have made a significant impact:
1) The introduction of IP and its strategic importance to the Boardrooms, as captured in more than a few popular books.
2) The establishment of ventures with business models based solely on the creation and commercialization of IP.
3) Initiatives to facilitate easier price discovery and trading of IP as an asset class such as live auctions and trading platforms.
4) The increasing alignment of corporations, research organizations and academic institutions with the creation and commercialization of IP, and
5) The growth of companies to support the IP industry through tools, platforms, and services to create, manage, analyze and commercialize IP more efficiently.
What is inherent in IP?
There could be different opinions about the scope of rights to be granted for intellectual property and the best means to appraise its value, but the benefits of intellectual property have now been widely accepted. The rights and values for most other types of assets are honored and agreed to (to a large extent) by those who own, purchase or rent them, and there are ready marketplaces to trade them as well. Why doesn’t this happen in IP in the same frictionless manner?
IP such as patents, include fairly complex ideas and inventions that have to be accurately described in words. This opens the door to varying interpretations, which in turn makes its boundaries difficult to pin down. The boundaries of the IP might be differently defined - some drawn by subject matter experts while others by legal professionals. Unlike most other types of property, intellectual property does not remain within a limited space and oftentimes finds applications in disparate domains. This makes it difficult to keep an eye on anyone encroaching the property as it were. To further complicate matters, the value of an IP is context and time-sensitive. It depends on the time period and the availability or emergence of a related one anywhere in the world.
A key aspect inherent in the IP lifecycle is that a team of experts try to encode it, to some extent encrypt it upstream, while another team of experts have the need to try and decode the encoded information further down the lifecycle. Such a downstream decoding is never easy since the objectives of the two teams are usually not aligned.
What will bring IP into the mainstream?
Keeping aside the various complexities in IP for the moment, the single factor that would have the greatest impact in bringing IP to the mainstream is transparency. The questions that this automatically prompt are,
Can we make the boundaries of an IP transparent to the general public? If so, how?
One may argue that this has already been done, as we are dealing with knowledge that is already made public by the concerned government bodies. However, for IP to truly enter the mainstream, additional steps are required. We need a way to represent the technical and legal boundaries in a predefined number of dimensions, that enable the layperson to understand and appreciate the internals of the IP. We need a system that can be followed by those creating IP as well as those analyzing, consuming, and commercializing IP.
Can we make any published knowledge available instantly?
This is the direction in which various forms of knowledge access is moving in. It should be possible to do the same for IP, using a common framework predefined for the IP. It does not mean that the knowledge should be accessible free of charge but it should just be accessible universally.
Will it affect IP rights?
Making IP transparent will not change or impair in any way the rights of the holder, nor prevent infringement. It will definitely make IP easier to understand and analyze.
Do we have the means and resources to make IP transparent?
Technology is hoped to be one of the means to make IP transparent. Earlier attempts to organize and analyze the knowledge base involved approaches such as,
1) Integrating patent, legal, scientific, and business information to define the context and discover the value of IP more accurately.
2) Use of technology such as machine learning, natural language processing, and semantic analysis to unearth relevant knowledge hidden within the integrated data, and
3) Introduction of new workflows, analytics, and visualization to minimize the effort to get relevant views of the data and provide faster insights.
These contribute to better understanding but only marginally improve IP transparency. The extent to which knowledge can be discovered by the above means is very limited compared to the extent that is already available with different stake holders in the IP domain. Additionally, just hoping for AI techniques to get better to deliver greater transparency may be overly optimistic especially if the objectives of the stakeholders are not aligned to make it transparent.
Every patent that gets filed goes through a few different subject matter experts who all are expected to understand the boundaries of the IP well. If we can capture their understanding into a knowledge base through a good framework and expose that to the world there is nothing more to do to make it transparent.
The entire process can be made less painful if the structure of the knowledge base can be clearly defined, and the process can be supported with a technology platform. What is required is a universal framework and technology platform to capture, organize, and share the core ideas contained in an invention or new finding such that,
1) IP becomes transparent to every stakeholder,
2) IP becomes measurable through a quantifiable framework that can differentiate distinct IP,
3) The effort of everyone involved can be captured once and reused later,
4) IP can be strengthened as an asset class through the resulting transparency, and
5) A marketplace can be created for the different stakeholders in the IP ecosystem.
The key question here is the feasibility of creating a framework that can capture and analyze IP in all its various aspects. It is difficult but not unrealistic as there have already been practices of classifying and connecting information relevant in patent documents and portfolios. Once the framework is formulated, platforms can be built to make the processes manageable.
This will benefit professionals who create or analyze IP, as they can capture their work and reuse the same with multiple clients. The overall ecosystem benefits as everyone will use an explicit, transparent, standard framework to capture and analyze IP to further progress. Owners and buyers of IP benefit as they get to better understand the value and technology content of the IP they own, and can trade it more confidently.
Marketplace for IP and knowledge
There are two possible ways for this to happen. The first one is a top-down initiative wherein regulatory bodies create and mandate a framework to capture and visualize the IP, which is then accepted and followed by the community. This route could however take a long time, for the required changes in regulations and the support of the technology firms and legal entities to fall into place. The issue of who will create the necessary technology platform will need to be resolved as well.
A less distant possibility is for a visionary organization, with a wide-ranging influence in the knowledge economy to take the lead in creating a framework and a technology platform to capture, share, and analyze IP. Such a move may nudge adoption among the other players in the ecosystem, motivated by the imperative to remain relevant. This transition will be faster if the framework and platform are both powerful, and simple enough for all stakeholders to adopt it simultaneously. Having transparency in IP will help create a marketplace for all subject matter experts, IP professionals, and businesses to create, analyze, and trade IP.
Who will lead the change?
Growing an economy based on knowledge requires the interaction between knowledge-based companies with legal and business entities. The IP industry has been at the heart of this interaction for decades and the lessons learnt in the process, will be crucial in the creation of a framework as suggested above.
The technology industry will also have its part to play in the process - not through the knowledge it creates, but via the creation of a knowledge platform. This will be a platform that utilizes the latest developments in artificial intelligence to make it easier for subject matter experts and IP professionals to capture, analyze and quantify their knowledge, make it transparent, easily discoverable, reusable and tradable. This in turn will allow businesses to access and analyze knowledge as a quantifiable asset.
Summary
The IP and technology industries together could revolutionize the knowledge industry and in turn make huge impact on the economy. This requires the different stakeholders to work together to bring transparency to IP and the related knowledge-bases through the implementation and adoption of an appropriate framework. This is expected to happen with the collaboration of regulatory bodies and visionary organizations. It is envisaged that this will encompass the introduction of a framework to represent knowledge, a technology platform to capture, analyze and quantify knowledge, and a marketplace to bring all stakeholders together to trade knowledge for the common good of all involved.
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