The decentralized future of defensive publishing
Originally published at www.bernstein.io.
Why defensive publishing
Defensive publishing denotes the publication of an innovation with the purpose of creating prior art thus preventing anyone (including the inventor) from patenting. This guarantees the inventor freedom to operate (FTO), that is the right to use the innovation.
Defensively publishing discloses technical information and therefore provides competitors with free access and rights the innovation. However, as the costs of patent applications and litigation continue to rise, defensive publishing is offering innovative companies an effective way of securing freedom to operate without incurring the significant efforts and costs involved in patenting.
Tom Colson: “If IBM had published disclosures of all of the incremental innovation around their pioneering technology, they could have prevented others from picket-fencing them. They would, in effect, have taken full control of the technology without putting patent resources at risk.”
“On the defensive about invention”, Richard Poynder, Financial Times, Sep 2001
In a first-to-file world, where even older innovations might be judged patent-worthy if a search reveals no published record of the invention, defensive publishing is getting more popular. However, it is neither trivial nor cheap to execute in a robust and indisputable way.
Current venues for publishing defensive publications range from traditional peer-reviewed journals to online publications. Yet, to successfully establish prior art, the discloser should pay attention to many relevant aspects that will make the difference between a well or poorly executed defensive publication.
Blockchain + IPFS, a new publishing media for perfect prior art creation
Blockchains, and particularly public blockchains, are immutable global registries and, as such, innovators can leverage them to produce a trail of records for all their R&D activities and create timestamped proofs of existence and ownership for any intellectual property asset (e.g. an invention).
Registering a document on a blockchain means that its hash, a cryptographic fingerprint of the document, is inserted in a blockchain transaction crafted according to a specific registration protocol. The hash is usually a 256-bit string, and therefore its publication does not count as a disclosure and the related IP asset remains private.
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a protocol and network designed to create a content-addressable, peer-to-peer method of storing and sharing hypermedia in a distributed file system.
The relevant feature of IPFS, besides its fully decentralized nature, is its content-addressable storage. This means that information written to IPFS can be located and retrieved using the content of the information itself. This is a huge advantage when compared, for example, to the web pages that are identified and accessed via their address (www.example.com/…/page.html) which do not depend on their content.
Therefore, IPFS enable innovators to publish their disclosures to a location that is determined by the very content of the disclosed invention. Any change in the disclosed documents, even minor ones, will move their location to an entirely new address.
Blockchain and IPFS together provide innovators with the perfect media for publishing their disclosures.
A decentralized approach to defensive publishing.
Bernstein defensive publishing solutions, based on blockchain and IPFS, enable companies to establish prior art, secure freedom to operate, and defend against patent trolls.
Read the full version of this article on www.bernstein.io for additional insights and resources about this new approach to defensive publishing.
