[MUSIC] Welcome back all of you, and we are now going to listen to the last lecture of this course, which is more of a philosphical lecture or more kind of a theoretical lecture. And we are going to look at why or why not patent your inventions. Now that's the question. Are we talking about patents, we're talk about freedom to apply, we're talk about a lot of things. Well, the question is kind of when should we patent our invention or when should we not patent our invention? Those are very important aims to discuss. So, why patent? So, the good side of why patenting our stuff is that, there are several advantages. First of all, we get exclusive rights from society. So basically once we patent we make a deal with the society and say this is my invention, this is mine, for a limited amount of time, it's my invention and I have full property of it and we do this exchange. You give me this right for 20 years and I give you my invention for a [INAUDIBLE]. So this kind of a basically stable, solid way of making agreement and making sure that the invention stays with me. Which means that you're protecting your invention. I spent time, I spent resources, I spent manpower, I spent intellectual power to come up with this invention. And I want to make sure that this invention stays with me. I want to make sure that it's mine. I want to make sure that nobody can actually leach on my invention and start using it. So I want to make sure that society, the state, and people know that this is mine. I made it and it's going to be with me for a certain amount of time, and that will allow me to work on it and make profit out of it. Your investment, I mean you have spent a lot of money to make that patent. It can be very small, little thing that you invented, but then to actually patent the thing will take some money. You might have come up with a new drug on the pharma company. You might have come up with a new molecule and that is a very expensive process. So we're talking about hundreds of millions of euros to just to generate a drug and you want to make sure that you protect that. You don't want to spend that money in coming up with a new formulation, with a new compound, and then basically letting anybody else just take it and sell it. You want to make sure that you're protecting your investment. It has to be yours and you want to come up with some time to recover your costs and to generate more funds to continue in your discovery process. And finally, which are still all related, these are all points related to each other. You want to block others from using your invention, as I said before. You have spent a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of resources, a lot of man power, a lot of everything to come up with this invention that you want to make money out of or that you want to sell, you want to make a business out of it. You also want to block other people from using it. You don't want anybody else to come up with the same idea later on or to see your idea and say that's interesting, let me do the same. No, you have a patent, you can block other people from using your invention. Again, as we said before, having the patent doesn't truly mean that you can actually sell your invention. It doesn't mean you have freedom to use it, but you can block a competitor from using his own invention. Or you can block people from using the process that you came up with to make money from your inventions. So basically you want to block others from using your invention. But that doesn't mean that you are allowed to say it yourself. It's just kind of covering your bases. So why does a Patent have a commercial benefit? It's a benefit to your company to have patents. And that's what we're seeing on the first lecture that we did on the introduction on the APR, how these intellectual property assets or intangible assets of a company are slowly becoming the biggest part of a company's wealth, because it's a benefit to have them. So basically, let's go back to the example that we had in the first lecture with the hammer. If you remember, we had a stick with a hammer like this, and then this way, so I came up with this patent, this hammer thing. So having a patent on the hammer, being the first one to have a patent on the hammer, means that you're actually controlling the market of hammers. So you can claim the hammer as a hard, solid head which has a handle that when rotated on itself and swinged onto a nail, inserts the nail into a surface. So you have this product claim. This is my product. This is what I have. Its metal stick or wooden stick with the head, with a flat surface that if applied violently on top of something else I can either break it or push into the wall. So I'm controlling, that is my invention. I'm controlling anything that's fits that. I can claim the use of the hammer for, banging a nail inside the wall, from this part here. But I can also claim the use of the hammer to remove such nail from the wall using this part here. So I have this use claims. I have these kind of method claims, use claims where I can basically any device that is used to insert a nail unto the wall or to remove it out of the wall that somehow fits my claims will be infringement of my patent. So I'm protecting that thing. I can also claim the process to produce the hammer. I made a machine that will put in a tree and you put in a piece of metal, will do some magic and we have the hammer coming out. I can claim, I can patent that, and that will be a process of production, I will patent the process of generation to hammer. So basically, I can cover all aspects of this hammer into my patent and I can control the market of hammers, I can be on top on the market of hammers for 20 years. So, when my patent is active, nobody can produce the hammer. Nobody can create the hammer. Nobody can sell the hammer. Nobody can offer the hammer for sale. Nobody can trade hammers. Nobody can stock hammers. Nobody can sell hammers making machines. So somebody makes a machine that makes a hammer from putting a different kind of wood and different other materials. You cannot do it. Nobody can do that without my written and agreed permission. So by having that Patent, I'm blocking the market and other than making a profit in selling the hammers and making the hammers. I can make a profit in allowing other people to sell, produce, create hammers. That's a business strategy. I license out my Hammer to other people and make money. Again, as you will see in other examples, so clear example was if you go back to my childhood which for you might be far, far in the past when the first videotapes came into the market we had the two wars between Sony and the other JVC which was he had beta and you had the VHS system. One was better than the other, but one didn't license out production of their system, while the others allowed other companies to create machines, to create readers, to create tapes. And that resulted in one company, Sony, with better marks to slowly disappear from the market because they were the only ones. While the VHS that was moved around with different companies and licenced to different companies stayed into the market. So it's social benefits to make even more revenue to patent your stuff and then license it out and allow other people to use it and produce it. So this is a good strategy. And these are the reasons why you want to patent, you want to protect your investment, you want to have exclusive rights, you want to stop others from using your invention and you want to make this deal with society where basically you are the sole owner of that invention for a certain amount of time. That's again kept very simple. On the other hand there might be situations where you might not want to patent your invention, or you might not want to go that route and that could be done because of several reasons. Your invention or your patent can be weak. It might be very difficult to write the patent in a very, very, how to say, tight way. So basically competitors could easily find ways to go around your patent or to find a way around your patent or to patent something which will block you. Thi is to say it would be not very strong and competitors can come around you and can make your patent useless. So do you want to spend money in going through that patent process and procedure? Maybe yes, but is it worth it? Patentability would be very difficult to obtain. Maybe you known that your intervention is novel and is applicable and non-obvious. But it would be very, very difficult to prove that. So do we want to go through the effort of patenting something when you somehow think, and your lawyer think that it will be very difficult to prove and to get that patent? You might want to go ahead but you might want to think against it because it might not be worth investment to go that route. Your invention might be difficult to defend in court in case of litigation. You might have the patent granted. You might be strong, competitors might not go around. But, as we have seen some cases, we have shown. Especially for the small chemicals and the compounds, you might go to court, from other companies, it might be very difficult for you to prove that you're actually novel, and different from somebody else. So it might be very difficult to defend yourself, and to win a lawsuit in case of litigation. And that would cost you a lot of money and might not be worth going through the patenting process. Finally, your invention might not bring any financial benefit. You might have a very strong patent, you might have very solid patent. You might want to patent it, it might be recommendable. But at the end of the day, funding for this patent, maintaining this patent, transmitting the patent, and keeping all the cots of that patent might not bring any advantage to reserve. It might be that you're actually losing money by having that patent rented and maintained rather than allowing it. So you have to think about, is it really benefit to keep this patent going while I'm losing money on it? [INAUDIBLE] It's again very general but these are reasons why you might not want to patent. And these are the negative parts of why not patenting. And I will again, as for other lecturers, I will put some references and some literature on the web site where it can read more about reasons why to patent, when not to patent. Where there are more studies from people actually doing research in this field. Where you can get more detailed analogies of these parts. So I'll say these are the negative parts of why not patenting? I don't want to patent because I might lose money or may not be beneficial. But there is also way where you might not want to patent your invention and that's because you know how could make even more money or even more profit than if you are to patent it. So your invention might be so revolutionary and so non-obvious that you might want to keep it as an industrial secret. You basically don't tell anybody, you just keep it to yourself. But you need to make sure that, that information will never be leave out. And that nobody will ever be able to get to it. Clearest example, usual example, Coca-Cola industrial secret, nobody knows the recipe. Nobody knows how it works. It's not patented. It's not written anywhere. Only the very few people know exactly how it does. And Coca-Cola has been in the market since 120, 130 years now. Still with the same formula, still there. Lot of people, lot of companies try to gets close to them, nobody matches to get close to them. So they have this very, very, very strong invention, this very strong formula that nobody was able to reverse engineer. And they never disclose it to anybody and it is one of the biggest companies in the world. So it just shows you that by keeping the secret to yourself without revealing it might be a good choice if you are sure that it can stay a secret. So to keep it secret, what we know, what we learn is that when you patents your stuff, you patent your invention, you are making a deal with society, all right? So you are making a deal with society where, I invent something and I go to the state, or do my patent. And once I do my patent application my invention and it's implementation and the way I prepare it, the way I make it, the way I use it. Every single detail of my invention is made available to society immediately. It's published, everybody knows how my invention works and how to prepare it. That is the deal I make with society, I tell you how to do it, you give me rights for a certain number of years. So it's a I scratch your back you scratch my back. But if I'm sure that my invention will never be reverse engineered, if I'm sure my invention is so unique and so far advanced and so inventive that nobody will ever come up with a way to replicate it or to make it ideally, then disclosing that to society soon after I patent it might not be a good idea. I want to keep to myself. Because if nobody can copy it, I don't need that protection, I just keep it to myself. And I just keep making a profit out of it. So I might not want to disclose all my secrets to somebody else when I'm sure that nobody will come after it. If Coca Cola had patented their invention in the late 1800s, after a certain number of years, that invention would have been not protected anymore, and everybody would be able to make the same product as Coca-Cola. They didn't do that. They kept it as a secret. 120 years on, they're still the only ones out there with that recipe. So that's kind of a good reminder on why sometimes you might want to not disclose your invention out there. With this slide, and this is the end of this lecture and it is also the end of this course. And I hope you enjoyed it, and let's wrap it here. Thank you. [MUSIC]
