Why Patent an Idea?
Have you ever had a great idea that you wanted to patent, but the hours of sifting through patents (and the large fees involved) made the task seem insurmountable? Loci’s goal is to inspire inventors to realize their ideas by helping them to successfully research their patents at a fraction of the cost. We’re here to show you what that process looks like, so one day you can take the steps to patent your invention.
How does Loci’s InnVenn Tool Work?
The United States is the leading country when it comes to individuals patenting their intellectual property. Simply stated: There are a lot of inventors coming up with new, and not so new, ideas all of the time. Protecting one’s intellectual knowledge is an important factor of every entrepreneur or inventor’s business model. On the InnVenn platform, you can begin the process of claiming your invention by simply searching for it. When other inventors come along after you with similar ideas, they will be able to see that you already came up with and claimed the invention; saving them wasted funds in research and development and saving you the cost and headache of litigation.
Claiming your idea on Loci is important to begin the process of protecting your own intellectual property, but there can also be monetary benefits to staking earlier than later.
The first step to securing the rights to your intellectual property is to create your claim within InnVenn. You have several options to choose from to customize your patent research process. You’re able to choose whether your claim is searchable on the database, and if you want to participate in something called Intellectual Property (IP) Portfolios. IP Portfolios are basically pools of similar inventions from thousands of individual inventors. When large companies are looking to develop a new product, it is common practice for them to buy up entire pools of IP Portfolios in order to greatly expand their own patent rights. When they buy up a pool that includes one of your staked inventions, you’ll get a nice payout in cryptocurrency.
From staking the initial claim, if you choose to make your claim searchable, your claim shows up alongside other patents in the system, resulting in a traceable disclosure event if someone searches for a similar idea and views your claim. The idea behind a disclosure event is what makes Loci’s vision unique to the DIY patent research process. The disclosure event gives you a 12-month grace period to file a patent on your idea. This is something that has never been implemented before and will save all parties involved time and money, allowing them to further fund product development.
In order to secure the 12-month grace period and log it in the immutable blockchain network, it costs 1 LOCIcoin. It’s during that transaction that your invention gets written to that LOCIcoin as a block in the Ethereum blockchain. Although, it costs 1 LOCIcoin to stake an invention on the blockchain, if the right investor comes around that 1 LOCIcoin could turn into thousands of LOCIcoin if they choose to buy it. Meaning, it can pay to make the decision to list your idea publicly. Use InnVenn to determine if your idea is eligible to stake and you could earn cryptocurrency by doing it.
Discovering Whitespace
At Loci, we know the traditional patent research process can be cluttered and cumbersome. Our visual patent research tool, InnVenn aims to solve that. By using a Venn Diagram to organize keyword searches relevant to your patent, you can streamline your patent research process. As soon as you submit the stake to your invention, it shows up as a dot within the Venn Diagram. When other people search for relevant keywords to your patent, your “dot” shows up, giving inventors a visual representation of how many other inventors are working on similar products. With Loci, the Venn Diagram can also show you where there is room for inventions and new ideas! We call this “whitespace”. An overlapping area of the Venn Diagram where there are significantly fewer dots means that there is more room for a variety of inventions. You can then position your invention or product accordingly, making it more likely to get patented or bought as part of an IP pool.
Why Blockchain?
Another way Loci is utilizing blockchain technology is integrating the use of cryptocurrency into the Loci ecosystem. Loci is excited to be able to integrate blockchain technology into simplifying the patent research process. By utilizing the immutability of blockchain, information regarding your idea (e.g. timestamps and dates) are locked into place with LOCIcoin on the industry leading Ethereum distributed ledger.
LOCIcoin is Loci’s unique cryptocurrency that will be used within this Loci ecosystem. By purchasing LOCIcoin, you gain the ability to pay for and use InnVenn, along with Loci products developed in the future. There will only be 50 million LOCIcoin in public circulation.
The only accepted form of payment for IP Portofolios within InnVenn will be LOCIcoin. Because of the 50 milllion LOCIcoin limit, once they belong to individuals, companies looking to purchase IP Portfolios will have to acquire the LOCIcoin needed from these individuals at a price that they set. LOCIcoin are initially being sold at $2.50, but because of supply and demand, that value will rise as Loci develops more products and the supply of LOCIcoin becomes limited.
Loci aims to simplify the patent research process, making it a more economic and reasonable investment for bootstrapped inventors to get their ideas patented. We call it mining ideas and we hope to change the relationship between Inventor and Investor forever.
For more information, feel free to join our Telegram group, or check out our white paper.
