Patents: Changing the World, Or Not?

I love reading classic patents. For the ones that are truly ground-breaking, there’s a feeling of “this is going to change the world”, and where there’s generally a better explanation of the methods than in academic papers.

We have had three highly successful spin-out companies (Zonefox, Symphonic and Cyan Forensics), and a new one finding its way (Memcrypt). Overall, we have always submitted patents, in order to protect our core IP, and also to support investment. I’ve been lucky that my university has an excellent approach to patenting IP, and often defend a patent, until a time that the spin-out company can buy it back at the cost of defending it. If you are interested in the patents I have been involved in:

• Resilient secret sharing cloud-based architecture for data vault. Expiry: 2036. Here.
• Digital Forensics (part of Zonefox innovation). Expiry: 2029 Here.
• Information Sharing (part of Symphonic innovation). Expiry: 2033. Here.
• Method for reducing false-positives for identification of digital content (part of Cyan innovation). Here.

An often critical advocate of the US patenting system is djb (Daniel J Berstein), and who has spent a good deal of his time criticising the patent system for areas of cryptography. For him, the patent system often…