Embedded - 277: The Sport of Kings

Episode Date: February 8, 2019

Jie Qi (@qijie) spoke with us about making paper-based electronics (@Chibitronics) and learning about patent law (via @Patentpandas). Jie Qi is the founder of Chibitronics, a crafting electronics platform that uses paper and stickers to create (and teach) circuits. Building the company and working on electronics-filled pop-up books led to the realization that patent law does apply to open source maker-type companies. She started PatentPandas.org to share what she’s learned. Jie is not the only one who has had issues with big companies patenting their open source work. We mentioned Jarek Duda and his fight to keep his compression algorithm unburdened by patents. If you are having or wondering about having an issue, Patent Pandas is intended to be an amusing and gentle introduction. If you are looking for prior art, you can look at the Prior Art Archive and Patents.StackExchange. (If you have some free time, there are often requests to find prior art.) If you are a maker wanting to ensure that your work has dated prior art, submit it to the Wayback machine (Archive.org).

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Alicia White, alongside Christopher White. From narwhals to llamas, you know how much I like using animals to make topics approachable. This week, this week it's going to be pandas. Ji Qi is here to talk with us about patent pandas. Hi Ji, thanks for joining us. Hello, thanks so much for having me here. Could you tell us about yourself? Sure.

So I am, well, currently I am based in Tokyo for a new gig at the University of Tokyo. But previously I was at the MIT Media Lab as a PhD student, where I did some projects and ran into some issues around patents. And so then after that, I was a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at the Harvard Law School, studying up on open source and patents. And that is what led me to create Patent Pandas. Basically, I wanted to create a teaching resource for makers, kind of tinkerers, artists, designers, people who maybe would otherwise be afraid of lawyers like I was to learn about patent law, because it's kind of important if you're a kind of a creator. Cool. And so we'll be talking about that. And you also started Chibitronics, right? The circuit stickers?

Yes. So that was actually my PhD research project turned into a company. So it's a company that produces toolkits to teach electronics and programming using arts and crafts. So to make it more friendly, accessible, and interesting to kids, designers, artists, people from non-technical backgrounds to start playing with hardware as a means to express themselves and create things. So that's what Chibitronics does. And Chibitronics is actually what led me to patent pandas as well. We'll get more into that. But we want to do lightning round first.

This is where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask why. Okay. Go ahead, Christopher. Oh, all right. Have you ever touched a panda? No. That would be so nice, though.

I'm not sure people are allowed to touch pandas. Is the most exotic animal you have touched? Oh, good question. I've touched some Madagascar hissing cockroaches. I don't know if that's exotic, though. They're just really big bugs. They're actually quite tame and don't really do anything. I think we'll accept that maybe i should have said what what is the most exotic animal you've hugged because i'm not really sure about cockroaches okay oh but it's okay i don't

think about this one okay yeah i don't know favorite weight of paper favorite weight of paper oh dear i should really i'm i'm showing my lack of nerdiness here uh but i guess i like a super thin kind of paper that's also very strong so i don't know what the weight is but um if you get like if you go to like a paper store they have a lot of handmade papers where um the fibers are super thin and so the paper is thin but because they're not made by a machine the fibers are arranged in like random ways that creates better linkages so the paper is super duper strong even though it's very thin and lightweight i don't know it's i guess washi paper it's one kind of japanese paper that could be like that oh cool let's go look at that yeah uh do you have a favorite fixative for

creating your own stickers favorite fix like adhesive yeah uh well the stickers that we use are um called z tape it's anisotropic, which basically means that it's a conductive adhesive, but it only conducts through the top and bottom of the glue, which means that you can connect things above and below, like double-sided tape style,

but it doesn't short out everything, like all the various pads. So that's pretty awesome and important for making our stickers work. So I guess that would be my favorite adhesive. Tokyo or Boston? Oh, so hard. Actually, not so hard. I'm new here. So I'm in the honeymoon period. I would say Tokyo., kind of to try to approach things with curiosity

instead of fear. And oftentimes it'll lead to good things. And if it doesn't lead to a good thing that you expect, it will lead to a learning experience. And that's still a good thing in my book. All right. Well, then we should go on because I think you have many things to say. And I do want to start with the Chibitronics. And you mentioned the adhesive. I guess we'll go back to that one. It conducts up and down, but not side to side. Yeah, it's pretty magical, right? So they're not touching each other,

but they're kind of on the same plane as the glue. And then the metal bits stick up and down out of the adhesive. So that's how you manage to get the glue to conduct from top to bottom. But because all the different particles aren't also touching each other, they don't conduct like in the X and Y axis, I guess, but up and down through the Z. So it's pretty amazing because if your conductive adhesive did conduct through the X and Y, then, you know, when you put your component down, it'll connect all the different leads. And so your component will just get shorted out. But with these, it doesn't do that.

And the particles are pretty tiny. So you get pretty good resolution. Like your, I guess the pads, your conductive pads can be pretty tiny, like, I don't know, less than a millimeter probably, and still be connected and like separate from its neighbor so it's pretty great so we've said circuit stickers and i did uh i had a chibitronics book a friend bought me one and it was great um and it was it was like copper tape and you could make circuits yeah um yeah so so what is what are circuit stickers um so it actually came out of my master's research um where i learned from my advisor

leah beakley that you could use conductive craft materials uh and use those to build circuits and then your circuits are going to look like craft materials instead of kind of the typical green PCBs that we think of when we think of electronics. So how it works is the copper tape is just like regular tape, except it's made out of copper. So it's conductive, right? And you typically find this in hardware stores, maybe in the plumbing section or even um in the gardening section apparently slugs don't like copper so you can use it to like protect your plants from slugs but apparently you can also use it to conduct electricity in your circuit um also people use

it for stained glass uh so you take this tape and and and you can just put it on any surface. I use paper because it's kind of cheap and it's friendly and everybody knows like what to do with it. So you just take the tape and just stick it down over your paper and those are like your wires. And then the stickers are basically flexible PCBs that have a component on them, like a sensor or an LED or whatever. And then using the conductive adhesive on the bottom of the sticker, when you stick it on top of the copper tape, it creates a circuit, right? So you're basically creating a circuit using copper, your flexible PCB, and then your adhesive as the connector. And and so electrically it's the same as any other circuit like one would do on a breadboard for example but what it feels like to somebody is that they're

sticking down tape and stickers and so the the process feels like you're using craft materials even though all your craft materials are also electronic materials the nice thing about copper tape, there's all these other, there's also conductive fabric tapes. Copper is super conductive, right? It's a metal and also you can solder to it. So originally my plan was you could start out with the stickers and sticking down copper, but then you can graduate, like step up into soldering. And then you've basically got like a regular circuit board at that point. So that's the idea. But the other part of it as kind of from an educational perspective, my hope isn't that people just learn like, oh, this is how you connect up an LED and it'll shine, you know, positive, negative, et cetera, et cetera. It was more like, okay, well,

why are we building this? The nice thing about building circuitry on paper is that you can take notes, you can draw pictures, you can, everything's flat, because we use surface mount components, and flat tape, you can even put another piece of paper on top of it. And suddenly, you know, the light is shining through and you can tell stories and draw and make like interactive images that have switches and sensors in them, like, you can then start using the interactivity of the circuit to tell your story or make an artwork. And for me, that second bit, which is to give like a meaning or a purpose to your circuit, that's the part that I'm really excited by, because then everyone can create a different circuit. They can tell about themselves, make it personal. And there it starts to make electronics, hardware and programming. You can use them as like an expressive material. It's not like just something that you learn, you know, to pass a test. It's something that you can use to make life more fun by allowing you to make interactive stuff that you care about. So that's kind of the idea. I remember the drawing part of it because I liked making my LED into a

sun, which I mean, it wasn't like it was this long ago, so it wasn't like I was five years old when I was doing it. But I still got that little joy of shiny light equals sun. Yeah. And have people done origami with it? That was what I was meant to go back and do. Yeah. You know, the water bomb that glowed when you

blew on it or something oh yeah well so there's like uh absolutely the the nice thing is that you know a paper can start out as flat but as you can see from origami it can turn into all sorts of wondrous things even though it starts out as a simple piece of paper so um people have done all sorts of illuminated things like cranes and the water bombs which look a little bit like lanterns lots of flowers um airplanes flying glowing airplanes the popular one um another cool one um if you you could try yourself if you want is those helicopters it's like the paper helicopter that's shaped kind of like a t and when you drop it it'll spin around um people have put leds on the wings that when it spins around it makes this pretty spirally light up pattern so yeah there have been a lot

of cool experiments um because yeah you you can start out by taping your circuits on like a flat sheet of paper and draw and stuff. And that's all fun. But you can also tape it in three dimensions and really just stick it onto anything. It doesn't even have to be paper. And so, yeah, people have had a lot of fun with it. And you brought up this idea that, you know, your drawing of a sun is suddenly like glowing. And so it's a sun that's glowing, but it's on paper. And it's kind of, it's this like kind of magical spark moment. That's exactly the moment

that I'm hoping to share with others. This idea that, you know, a humble sticker and a humble piece of paper can still do this new wonderful thing. And not only can it do it, like you can do it. You're the one that built it. You're the one that drew it. You, you know, created a circuit. You're on your way to building hardware or more hardware, that is. And that's kind of this, I think, really empowering moment.

These teachers from a nonprofit called NextMap, I worked with them early on in the earlier days of Chibitronics, and they called it this light bulb moment. I'm making air quotes. You can't see it, but the light bulb moment. And what it is, is that a lot of people come into this and they're like, I've never built a circuit before. Am I going to get electrocuted? Like, you know, this is totally foreign to me. I'm not sure I could do it. But then, um, like pretty much everyone lights up that first LED and the moment it glows, it's this like, Whoa, I did it. Like I, I, I, I can do this. Like, there's this, this like step in like, belief and confidence that like, wow, it not only is it this a surprising thing that, you know, to see a piece of paper glow, it's also even more awesome that like, you know, you're the one that did it. And so yeah,

just I wanted to highlight that moment because because we see that and it's just really wonderful, even though a lot of people are like, oh, it's just a simple light. But for some reason, that simple light glowing on a piece of paper that then somebody turns into their name or the sun or whatever is just really magical. Is your background in electronics or education or art or MIT Media Lab is so confusing. Yeah, I agree. It's still confusing to me. So my undergrad is actually in mechanical engineering. So I like to build stuff. And frankly, only half of undergrad was mechanical. The first half was biomedical engineering because my parents wanted me to be a medical doctor uh you know like to say the jokes on them i became a doctor but like i have a doctorate anyway so anyway um but yeah so i i

the whole my whole journey has been extremely uh winding and non non-linear i would say so from biomedical engineering to mechanical engineering i switched because i realized i wanted to build stuff and be expressive and from what i can tell you can only be so expressive when it comes to treating humans like you have to be creative but expressive and personal is a different thing altogether so um you know i switched to mechanical because the mechanical engineering students got access to the machine shops. That was my motivation there. And then during that time, my junior year of undergrad, I heard about Aya Bad an artist who does art with technology, and she's an alum from the Media Lab. And at the time, she was in New York. She was an artist in residence at IBEAM, this art and technology center, and she was just looking for interns.

So I basically begged to be her intern, and I ended up working on Little Bits, which is this modular electronics toolkit that snaps together with Legos. Yeah, I was like intern number two or something and that's how i learned to solder and started to get into electronics so aya was the one that introduced me to this and then she introduced me to the media lab um through my then advisor leah beakley um and then i went and did an internship there and leah was the one who introduced me to paper craft and electronics. So I'd been a paper nerd like all my life and I had a background in engineering because I like building stuff. But Leah was the one who kind of taught me that I could combine both of them by making,

you know, electronics out of paper. And so that's kind of where that started. I made this pop-up book that had lights and sensors and stuff, but everything was made kind of where, where that started. I made this pop-up book that had lights and sensors and stuff, but everything was made out of conductive paints and conductive tapes and paper. And so, you know, even though it had all these different kinds of sensors in it, they looked like, you know, like, like stars or flowers or skyscrapers, um, instead of kind of squares and rectangles and circles, which is what we typically think of as sensors. And that kind of blew my mind because it was like, oh my gosh, these two things that I really like just came together in this magical way. And so I've been kind of

experimenting with paper electronics ever since. But part of that process was, you know, I enjoy this. Who else might enjoy this? So that's when I kind of also started doing workshops and sharing with others. And that was kind of what led me into the education realm. And so I guess the very long-winded answer is that one thing led to the next and it grew kind of organically. But I never really planned to be an electrical engineer or an educator or an entrepreneur for that matter. But they all kind of flowed one to the next, you know, with a purpose. I wanted to share. So I started teaching.

I wanted to share my tools. So I became an entrepreneur. And then law followed after that. But I you'd expect from a pop-up book. But then it gets colored and it becomes beautiful and then it becomes part of the world. And now the cartoon has gone from flat to 3D. That was kind of how it looked like it was in the process of going from a book to a world. How did you achieve that? Well, thank you. I was like, that's such a poetic way to describe what I made.

Thanks. Yeah. So, well, it wasn't really planned. So the book was originally basically an assignment. My advisor, Leah, asked me, hey, I know you on your keyboard. And then they worked. And I was like, okay, I did that. But then at some point, I made a, I think it was a flower. I think that was the first one. I made a flower that was also a switch that used like a pull tab from a pop-up book. And then I was like, oh my god, I can make switches that don't look at all like switches. This is so fun. And from there, basically the first page is all flower theme, like some sort of scene. So the next page was potentiometers using resistive paints that allowed you to fade lights in and out instead of just turning them on

and off. And the theme there was underwater. And so basically I went from one page to the next with kind of a different sensing mechanism that I wanted to explore, like pressure sensors or, you know, actuation using shape memory metals um and then each page also had a visual theme so that it it it it kind of created a world i guess would be how you put it um that was not just the abstract sensors themselves it and and and that just kind of whatever i happened to be interested in at the time turned into the scene. So for example, there was one that was using bend sensors, and then I discovered the laser cutter. So I laser cut these super delicate skyscrapers from the skyline in New York, because I was from New York,

and I loved the skyline. But then I was able to add lights to the skyline using conductive paint. And so just kind of all grew from one page to the next until I had like, I think six pages that had all different scenes and I thought showed enough of the breadth of the different kind of paper, electronic sensors and actuators. And then that was the book. And that's kind of how it came together. It just kind of, the process of making that pop-up book was actually, it was like one of those defining moments in my life, you they are super positive. They change the course of our life in one way. Sometimes they're super negative and they change the course of our life in another one. But there are these defining moments that kind of you think back on that you're like, wow, a bunch of my decisions came out of this moment. And that summer making this book was exactly one of those defining moments for me,

because at the time, I was just playing, it really was falling in love with what I was doing, because I happen to love paper, and I happen to love, like electronics and engineering, and they were coming together in my like, before me, in a way that I had never seen before. And in a way that I think most people haven't seen before, because it was a research project. And I just just kind of fell in love with it and I've been doing it for the rest of my life. And, you know, now sometimes it can feel like work. Sometimes it'd be really challenging. But at that time, it was just like, this is amazing. I can't believe I get to do this.

And I've in some funny way, I've been kind of chasing that creative high ever since. So I don't know. It's a very, very meaningful project for me. And it led to going to Google to talk to other people about it. Ah, yes. That's where the story gains a bit more dimensions and some more soul. A bit of foreboding music. Yes.

Yeah, things don't ever stay simple. But interesting, they become interesting. So, yeah, I took, you know, I have been and I continue to be really, like, obsessed with how can we tell stories in new ways, especially with physical objects. And that was an interest of a group at Google at the time, a small subset called ATAP, Advanced Technologies and Projects, I think.

And they were also very interested in storytelling with new technologies. And one of the projects they were interested in was augmenting the physical book. And so, I first met with someone, they came to visit at the lab, and I shared with them some of my work. And they were like, oh, you should come and come visit us sometime. And I was like, okay, cool. So, I went to, they invited me over, you know, free trip to San Francisco during spring break I visited and toured the office and then I showed them you know my work in the pop-up book and some other things involving books and electronics and it throughout the course of the day it quickly it made I realized it turned into an interview and I was thinking maybe I could like do an internship over

the summer but by the end of the day they had introduced me to the director of the lab. And she said, Hey, we want you to start like immediately. Can you take a break from your PhD? I was in I think the second year of my PhD, first or second year, anyway, of my PhD at the time and they were like you know you could just take a take a pause and you can always go back um and so I was like oh my god that's amazing I get to like work at Google and um hang hang out with some of my like creative heroes from Disney and Pixar and I was like oh my god this is amazing then I, you know, had to think about it and I talked to various people around the lab. Um, and in the end realized like, you know, I should maybe stay in school. This was very sudden and like finish out my degree. I had also just was doing chibitronics at the time too. And so it was just so much to just pause everything to work on this, this project, which was on a very tight timeline. They had like two years to do the project. Um, and so I ended

up turning down the offer and saying, but Hey, I can come back, you know, for an internship or something. Um, and I did actually ended up going back to do a workshop with them on, on paper circuits and chibitronics. That was fun. But then that was in 2014. 2016, I found out in, I think, March that some of the same people who had interviewed me and offered me the job had also taken out a bunch of patents on books and interactivity and even especially pop-up books. And that just, you know, they were patents on things that we had discussed, on things that other people had also already done. And it was just this, like, scary, sad, surprising feeling that, you know, these people who I would have been so excited to work with could then, you know, these people who I would have been so excited to work with could then, you know, go and

take out patents on the kind of things that we had discussed. And, you know, I was really scared because I didn't know how patents worked at the time. And I was really scared that, like, this was my work, like my all like, a huge part of what I'm excited to do is this stuff. And so, if it gets patented by Google, does that mean I can no longer do these things? Like, you know, so I was really scared at that time. And that, yeah, that was when the pop-up book came back into my life in a totally different way. Yeah, when you hear about patents and people stealing intellectual property it's often the other way like oh uh somebody took something that i had patented and they're they're stealing it it but oftentimes it's this way it's somebody patenting something that you've

done and locking it down and there's it seems like there's not a lot of recourse a lot of times or at least there didn't used to be. Yeah, I mean, this is a whole other side of it, which is what I've, on the one hand, when we think of patents, we're like, oh, you can, you know, you can make people pay you for your work, for your mentions. Like, you get rich if you get patents, that sort of thing. But what it really is, it's a legal proceeding that basically whoever is the owner of the patent can say who is allowed or not allowed to use it. And so, in fact, you know, when I thought patents, that means nobody can use it. It actually just means that whoever owns the patent can say who is allowed. And they could say that everybody is allowed to use it. You can open your patent if you want. But people are typically people don't do that. Probably because patents are so expensive to get that, you know, they at least want to

recruit the cost of the patent itself. But so there's so many, so many intricacies with the patent system. And what I've learned is that the patent system is a bit of a pay-to-play system. And so you can only really participate if you have the legal support or the money to pay for the legal support. Otherwise, it's almost like you're in a different universe. Unfortunately, the patent system is also very one size fits all in the sense that no matter who you are, you know, you pay the same fees and most likely you will still have to pay for a lawyer. And so what to a grad student or a random maker like me, you know, a thousand dollars it's a lot of money i can buy a laser cutter with a few thousand dollars right whereas to like a giant company a few thousand dollars is like a rounding error you know so so that's where it starts to become problematic there's lots of other

problematic bits too but um yeah i i'm happy to go into them. That's almost just like where to even begin. Yeah. And that's one of the things that I think Patent Pandas is for is because there's this, where do you even start? And so maybe tell us a bit about Patent Pandas. What is it and what should people look for there? Yeah, so I made Patent Pandas as a result of my kind of run-ins with patent law. So to give a little bit of background that ties all of these stories that we've been talking about all together, two things happened. So first, so remember Chibitronics, our circuit stickers toolkit? So we did a crowdfunding campaign back in 2013 in December. And then it turns out that one of our crowdfunding campaign backers ended up taking out a patent on LED stickers, which is our core product. And she filed for it after we even shipped out the product. So she had she had new she knew about our campaign. Months passed, we fulfilled the campaign. And then

she filed her provisional patent. A provisional patent is like the earliest, most draft like thing you could possibly file. And it doesn't take a lot to file that, but, but she filed that one after we shipped the product to her, um, on led stickers. And, and we, as an open hardware company, we didn't really patent anything. Everything we did was under creative commons. And so we were like, share with the world. Right. Um, so not only did this person try to, I found out in February of 2016 that this person succeeded, the patent was approved. And so now this person try to, I found out in February of 2016 that this person succeeded, the patent was approved. And so now this person actually has a patent on LED stickers, despite us having, before she even filed, like done all of this research, published research papers,

as an academic, I do that, done workshops, basically started a company and still somehow, despite all of that prior art, the patent had passed. And so that was the first kind of like, wow, this sucks for me. But then a month later was when I found out about the Google patents that after the interview, apparently the people had taken out patents on a lot of the things we discussed that they knew already existed. And so the fact that I found out about these two kind of patent situations at the same time made me think like, wow, patents are important and it's very easy for things to go wrong. My original assumption was like, oh, patents, that's just for people who, I don't know, are greedy and want to make money. And so I just thought that I could just ignore it and just make stuff, right? Like, I was just like, I'm in a different universe. These don't exist. But that's not what happened because other people either attempted to or successfully patented my work. And I have a

feeling that many creators out there kind of think similarly, where it's like, well, I'm open source, this stuff doesn't concern me. Maybe, but for you at first, when it's just on your desk, you kind of have control over it. But as soon as you start publishing out into the world, and other people start seeing it, then things like patent law, how do different entities engage in with creative new stuff like that is patent law that starts to matter when it's not just you anymore. And so I created Patent Pandas to share that the basics of like, how does patent law work? It's super unintuitive, and super expensive. And like, that explains why, you know, like, we know so little about it. And frankly, I was, I used to be really scared of lawyers. I was like, lawyers just complicate things. Well, it's like being scared of the doctor, like doctors complicate things, but you still,

you need to go to the doctor when something's wrong. You can't be scared of the doctor for too long. So, so, so this is kind of my hope. I wanted to tell people like, what are the basics of patent law? Um, not to be scared with lawyers, what it's like to work with a lawyer. And if you need help, there's a whole page that connects people to free. So pro bono legal resources, so volunteer lawyers or law clinics from universities, you know, people who want to help you and aren't like just trying to like take your money basically. So that was kind of the idea. And because, you know, patent law is scary and confusing and sometimes just frankly, maybe not all that interesting to a lot of people. I made sure

to put in my own stories and hopefully we want to share stories of other people to be like, yeah, this affects you and this is what it's like to go through it. But also I worked with my sister to create comics out of pandas. So that's why it's called Patent Pandas. And the idea is that the learning resources are all illustrated using these creative panda characters. And so, you know, that's how you kind of learn about the process, because I figured like patents are scary and pandas are not. And so let's just mush them together. And maybe the pandas can take some of the edge off. So that was kind of the idea of patentpandas.org. It used to be

openinnovators.org, but nobody remembered that. So we just switched it to the pandas instead. And that seems to have stuck much better yeah what do you wish having learned all of this about patents what do you wish you could have told your 2012 self before you started the kickstarter before you started chibitronics yeah so um i would say like do what you're doing i i still think we did the right thing by openly publishing and all of that um but like don't be scared if if something surprising happens with patents right like i think now it's almost like if you're in the creative industry and you're coming up with new things, I would not be surprised if somebody is trying to patent that sort of work. Like, it's so common that I'm like, oh, don't panic. It's like maybe the first time you have the flu, you think you're going to die, but you actually just have the flu and you go to the doctor and they're like, don't worry, just take this medicine.

You'll feel better in a week. It's a bit like that. Like, I think some of the best advice I got when I was going through all this, like, I'm pretty calm now, but when it first happened, you know, several years ago, I was freaking out. Like, I found out about the two patents maybe like a few months before I was supposed to defend my PhD dissertation. And it like for a little while, it just like, it just stopped, you know, all of my work because I could only like freak out about patents. I wish I didn't do that because, you know, it turns out that things are going to be okay. And the worst thing that can happen is to let legal kind of matters distract you from doing what's important, like your work, your research, your creations, building things.

Like, don't let it stop you from doing that stuff. Like, then it will really have affected you. if you just think of it as this kind of thing in the background that you still have to pay attention to and make sure, you know, you talk to your lawyer or whatever, and you can get free lawyer, free lawyers to help if you don't have the money, you know, you can get it taken care of and still go on with your life. Like that's, that's the, the, that's the most important bit. It's like, don't let it distract you because it can feel very urgent and very scary and take over everything. But it doesn't have to.

And there are people out there who can help you. That's the other thing. Like, you know, when something like this is happening, I didn't I was actually lucky, super lucky because I was at MIT and I had access to resources and people who had experience this stuff. I could not imagine if I didn't have access to those like mentors and helpers and the legal clinics, it would be so scary because I would not know the first thing to do. But there are there are there are legal clinics that will help you for free. And and they just want to help. Right. And so I think that's really important to like, you know, there's another kind of I think, Mr. Rogers, where it's like, you know, you can see a disaster, but if you look at when something bad happens, there will also be the helpers. So look for the helpers too. And that gives you hope. So it's like that with this stuff too. I'm really surprised to hear you say this. It sounds like for all that you had a fairly terrifying few months where you wondered if you would get to even make a product that you designed, that you did so much work on. And now you're saying, well, it turns out it'll be fine. Don't panic. It's all going to be fine.

I'm surprised. Yeah. Where does that come from it's all going to be fine. I'm surprised. Yeah. Where does that come from? That's a really good point. Like, I don't even realize that because I think even in the past few months, I've learned so much since like doing launching patent pandas and talking to more people, lawyers, inventors, various experts and just makers. And yeah, it's like a, so for example, maybe to explain, there's someone else that owns the patent on LED stickers. They still own the patent on LED stickers and Chibitronics still makes LED stickers. Like how can that be, right? Like when that first happened, we were so scared that we would suddenly have to shut down our company because our company is doing a thing that someone else has the patent on. Well, it turns out, or not it turns out, but it's the case that we published so much proof that we were doing this before the patent happened,

that if this person ever tried to enforce their patent, like they would have to take us to court to make us stop, right? If they ever took us to court, it would be very easy for us to say, hey, this patent is invalid. Here's the proof. And then we have so much prior art because we were very open about our work that we would, I think, be able to invalidate the patent if it came to it. So then the question is, why don't we just invalidate it now? Right? We have so much proof of prior art. Well, it's because the process of invalidating a patent, it's called an IPR, is so expensive. So everything is so expensive. So to give you an idea, the fees alone for invalidating a patent through an IPR process where you submit to the patent office, like, hey, this patent is invalid. This is reason why the fees alone are about, I don't,

I think maybe 10, $15,000. But then to write up the report, to do that properly and get it through the system, you have to hire a lawyer to pay for their time because it's a complex process. On average, this process would cost a company at least $100,000, typically maybe $200,000, $300,000. That's what I've read. So in order to just invalidate the patent, we would have to spend probably at least $100,000 to do so. That's a lot of money for a young company. So for us, we just try to leave it alone. However, if you're a giant company, $100,000 is not so bad because a full patent lawsuit is millions and millions of dollars. So if you can like nip the lawsuit in the bud by getting rid of the patent for like one or two

hundred thousand dollars, that's that's a steal. Right. So for a big company, that's totally fine for us. Doesn't really make sense. And so even though somebody has a patent on our work, we continue to make product. If we end up going to court, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I guess the other thing I've learned is that you have to kind of be very risk tolerant in this space. It still sounds scary, right? Because you're in a position where you said we have all the prior documentation that it would be easy to invalidate and incorporate. You still have to go to court, which still potentially, I mean mean yeah if you win do you get attorney's fees and things or are you still out a bunch of money even if you win oh yeah see that i don't know right i haven't actually

gone to court so i i'm definitely not an expert in that process i i think it will cost a lot of money we so it's still scary you know again it one of those, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. But on the other hand, like the other person will also have to pay a lot of money. So it's almost like, well, I guess if to even engage, like they will also. Mutually assured destruction. Detonant, yeah. Yeah, it's like it has to be worth it for them too, which I don't, you know, it's looking kind of grim for them. So it is this kind of situation where it's like, why would they take us to court? It would cost so much money and the likelihood that they will succeed is so low that, you know, people take people to court, at least my understanding, typically, to to make money not to lose it so you know that's kind of the situation well the patent holder if they lost with you would invalidate

their own patent and therefore if they have anybody else who is licensing the technology they lose that income as well oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And frankly, if anybody was to license a patent, they should do their homework and see if the patent's any good, right? I mean, I don't know. All of this is my opinion. I'm certainly not a lawyer and, frankly, definitely not a legal expert either. But my thinking is that, yeah, like whoever licenses a patent, or if this person decided to go after someone else, they should just do their homework and be like, well, is this actually, you know, is this a strong patent? And as soon as you do a little bit of research, I think it becomes pretty clear that, yeah, there's so much prior art that it's like, how could this have passed,

you know? So, yeah, for this particular one, I think it's not completely safe, right? The fact that it exists means that there's risk, but it's such a clear case of a bad patent that I hope that takes away some of its teeth, I think. And maybe by sharing my story, whoever might get hit by it will have heard of it through Patent Pandas or something and be like, oh, not that one. I've heard that most of the Kickstarter hardware, open source sorts of things do end up patented by people who are not their creators.

Oh, really? Yeah. It's one of those things that you go on Kickstarter and there are many people who are like, oh, Kickstarter, you must have a ton of money. And the scams just roll in. Yeah. in um oh yeah it's just what advice do you have for them to keep track of their uh prior art and does prior art really matter now that it's first to file instead of first to invent yeah and and here and here's another kind of like sad truth about prior art currently, which is that, yes, we created so much prior art.

But as you can see, the patent still passed and the patent still passed because the examiner, the person that reviews the patents, did not see our prior art. Like, you know, and basically how it works is that examiners have about 12 hours total to review the entire patent from beginning to end. And that means they're not going to find every piece of prior art. In fact, for the most part, patent examiners only look at past patents for prior art. And so, you can see the flaw in the system system which is that if you don't have the money well they do but i think okay so i again i can't speak for examiners i can only say what has happened um which is that they are they appear to be only looking at past patents perhaps because they're very very heavily indexed in a way that's easy to search.

Like the search process has to be super documented. When you say that something disproves some claim in a patent, you have to like say, explain why. So it's like a, it's kind of a, it's an involved process to pull in prior art and make it like legally proof that therefore this idea isn't new. Like all of that is, as far as I can tell, somewhat complicated. And so there's not the bandwidth to search every academic journal, every newspaper, every et cetera, et cetera as I can tell, probably under-resourced. And so they can only find so much. And I'm not sure why it's for the most part that they search only patents. But that seems to be the case. Like when I looked at the, you can go on the USPTO website,

and there's this thing called public pair, P-A-I-R, where you can actually search patents and patent applications and look at exactly the process in which, you know, every single step of the way, like when they submitted this, when the examiner responded um it's called an office action you know you can see everything everything's dated all the documents are public and in mine the led stickers one there was no mention of like in the actual examination process um the the person the who filed didn't even submit any prior art the examiner found all the prior art and all the prior art that the examiner found was just prior patents. Like it was just a poor, fast review. And I think that's just often the case. But bringing that back to Kickstarter and stuff like, yeah, unless you

have a patent on your stuff, it's very possible that they won't see all your newspapers and journal articles and things like that, because that's not where they're looking. But there's a silver lining. The more prior art you make, no matter what kind it is, as long as it's published and has an official date to prove that it came first, you can always use that in court. It's still useful later on to prove that yours is, you know, the first, if that was what happened. And a quick trick, if you wanted to make a prior art quickly, you can post a page online and then use the internet archive, just archive.org, and submit your webpage and they'll make a copy of it and that'll give it an official posting date. And you can use that lawyersusearchive.org

as web, like as digital prior art. So if you want to make prior art, just, just do that. But anyway, so it's still useful. And, and, you know, so, so even if the patent passes, which makes life scary and difficult, you still have the power to defend yourself in court later on. You also have the power, and this came from a recent conversation, that even if somebody did patent the thing and you have all this proof, you can also go up to them and be like, look, if you come after me, I'm going to invalidate your patent. Or if you come after anybody, I guess, if you can somehow know, I have the power to invalidate your patent. And that does give you some leverage. Like if you have good prior art, you can go directly to the person

and say, like, I have proof that will make you lose this. And that is real leverage. So like not all hope is lost. Are you familiar with patent.stackexchange.com? Yeah. So actually, I didn't know about it. But then when I published Patent Pandas, someone actually shared that with us. So I think it's amazing. I love it. I just checked it out. And I think any community where people can ask and learn about this is awesome. And in fact, Patent Pandas is slowly improving. I am one human and we are a tiny team. But I'm hoping to make a place of links to other resources on the web, like the Stack Exchange page. Because I think, yeah, everything, every avenue in which people are able to

learn is, is good. I guess the only problem is that, and even for, I suspect for pen pandas, I feel like people typically only look at this when they're in trouble. Yeah. So, you know, the dream is how do you make this stuff interesting enough that like there, you can do some like preventative care um you know so so yeah but i think i think it's great and i hope that there can be more out there and the other thing i will share is that when i was kind of going through a lot of the scary patent stuff um you know the first thing i turned to was the internet and i feel like most of the stuff that i saw was either

like super illegally so i i wasn't quite sure what it was saying or it was super like basically just trying to sell me, sell me a service. And so I just couldn't tell what I could trust or not. And so, you know, I'm hoping to create something that nobody's trying to sell you anything. We just want to give you good information. Everything's free and under creative commons and everything's been checked by like legal clinics from universities. So, you know, it's all about teaching. That's kind of my goal here with Patent Pandas too. Okay. Your website is going to get reviewed by legal clinics, which are usually free but not always uh so they have been so everything we post online has been reviewed by a law clinic so um the the harvard cyber law clinic the usc law clinic um oh gosh sorry it's fine i mean people can look it up online if they want to know

yeah yeah yeah so so basically everything we post has been reviewed by a lawyer and a law student. And so it's all good information. And you're not trying to sell things. How are you funding Patent Pandas? How are you going to make it so that it lives a good long life if you're not making money from it? That's a good question. Well, I mean, right now, it's just, it's just, I think of it as just writing, and I'm happy to do it. I've found the law clinics are extremely generous in that, you know, they've volunteered their time as a project. Oh, yeah, sorry, the Suffolk Law School as well. And because for them, it's a way to teach their law students, you know, about patent law, it's kind of a mutually beneficial project. And in fact, the very beginning of Patent Pandas was started with a grant from

the Berkman Klein Center. I was a fellow. And so, fellows get a small grant to launch projects. And so, I used funding from that to like get the initial website set up and get everything started. But now that the website exists, it's a matter of drawing pictures and writing. And, you know, my sister is an awesome put the content up, it's just, it's mostly web hosting, which isn't too expensive. You know, as it grows, we'll kind of figure it out. In my experience as a, I guess, as an entrepreneur, it's kind of like one step at a time. And as the thing grows, then you kind of grow your resources to go with it. But right now it's, it's enough that we can kind of handle it on our own with, with support from, again, super generous law clinics and folks who have been basically volunteering their efforts and expertise. I was going back to the Stack Exchange, patents.stackexchange.com. There's a tag called Prior Art Request.

And we were talking about prior art. And now we're talking about volunteering your time. And I just want people to know that that exists both because there are many people who are volunteering their time there, but also because if you are one of the people who are very against patents, and I know there are some of you out there, it's a good place to spend your time to volunteer to rip apart these patents that people post yeah yeah um i i guess that's that's very cool we should put that on there too it's it's funny it's so you know one of the questions that i've been getting is um a would you patent your work from now on?

Yeah. You know, to prevent this stuff. And B, like, what do you think about patents? And so to answer the first question, I personally, I'm still rather just open up my stuff and make it as accessible as possible because I've, in my experience, collaboration makes the project grow and get better and evolve. And I want as few barriers as possible to collaboration. I, you know, my approach of publishing as much as possible to create prior art and using that if I ever need in the court of law, is kind of still where I am because, to be honest, there's so much creative work in the world that if everybody who had good ideas

also had the resources to patent them, there would be so many more patents. You could just spend all your time patenting stuff, but not necessarily make a thing that impacts somebody out in the world outside from like the legal fees and whatnot. And I think making projects come to life is, to me, the real goal, not securing who has, you know, the first dibs on what. And it takes time, it takes energy, and it takes a lot of money to get patents. And those resources can, again, go toward making your project real. And that's why I still think, like, I'm, for myself, I would go the, you know, open and non-patent route. Of course, everybody's situation is different.

My understanding is that if you're looking for investment, many investors will be interested in patents. Of course, that also depends on the field. If you're in certain software startups, patents can also be a waste of energy because the pace of technology is moving so quickly that by the time you've gotten your patent, which takes about maybe two years, you know, the technology is already obsolete. So there it might not make sense as much to get patents. But again, you know, every case is different. But for me, I'm so grateful that I know this and I know what to do if, you know, other people are patenting my things.

And so I'm grateful for the knowledge that I have because now I know what to do if, you know, other people are patenting my things. And so I'm grateful for the knowledge that I have because now I can like go to sleep at night. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to start engaging in this because you can start hoarding patents, right? And all you have are patents instead of like impact in the world, in my opinion. Of course, everything is more complicated than that. And I guess that also answers the question of, you know, do you believe in patents and things like that? I think that people who are these awesome volunteers who are helping people find prior art, helping people fight bad patents, that's super important too, because, um, you know, especially some of these patents might cover super broad things that lots of scientists, lots of researchers and lots of creators might need. And so there, if there are people out there to help fight this, that's, that's great. Um, but it's, how do I say it? It's kind of, you have to kind of approach it from every single direction because it's such a complex and

massive um challenge i guess so every bit helps the education front the patent finding front the pro bono lawyers who are who are you know on the ground like all of that is is really important yeah i think it's like you were saying it's complicated because even if you don't feel like you're supportive of patents, it's really easy to get sucked into being defensive with them, right? Like, well,

I don't want to patent this, but I'd, I'd better because these other people are out there going to come after me if I don't. Yeah. I've seen that a lot too, where it's like, well,

we have to patent this because we're just protecting ourselves. And instead it becomes something a little bit perverse years later. Yeah, right. So here's the thing. If you get a patent and then your company goes under and you go bankrupt, then part of the things that anybody could buy is your intellectual property. And so that's how a lot of patent trolls get patents. They buy them from companies that have gone under, and then they use them against people, right? So there's all sorts of mechanisms to kind of be aware of. But yeah, it's tricky. One thing I will add, if for the

listeners who are perhaps more like me, you know, individual creators, as opposed to being a giant you know company um patent lawsuits are the sport of kings there's like they're very expensive um and and so in my when i think about it it's like even if you have a patent if you're an individual like will you even have the money to ever actually use it i don't know right and then if you can never enforce your patent, what's the point of having one? So there's like all of these questions that I have in my head. I don't know the answer that I feel like maybe leave the patents to the giant corporations that do spend ridiculous amounts of money just in gridlock in patent litigation. And then kind of as an individual, maybe don't worry about it so much of course you know so again like i'm not an expert and i can only speak of my own situation i don't

know everybody's situation but it's just it's so easy to get sucked into it and like lose lots of energy and and financial resources into this. I understand what you're saying because I want to create things. I don't want to be a lawyer. I mean, if I wanted to be a lawyer, I'd be a lawyer. I want to be an engineer. I want to make things. And I want to be a creator on the side and make my own things. But I worry that what you're saying, I know everything is, it's complex and everybody has their own situation,

but I worry you're a researcher and that, that, you know, having a PhD is really cool and gives you some special power. What if Google had patented your pop-up books? What if you, what if, and they are a huge company, they easily could have done that. Yeah. And then they have the money to come after you. Yeah. So you're right. I am super privileged in where I am to complete kind of where that story went though those patents

didn't go through but the only reason I think um one of the main reasons they didn't go through is because I happen to have been a PhD student at MIT and the director of my lab Joey Ito knew the director of ATAP at the time Regina and so he literally emailed directly and was like, what's going on? And because we had that channel of communication, we were able to get in touch. They responded to us. And in the end, I wrote up a big list of related work, prior art, and sent it to them. And then they submitted it to the USPTO. And when the USPTO saw a bunch of research papers that covered this work, they basically rejected the patents. So the patents didn't go through.

And that's kind of like a miracle, right? Like, how often does the one director know the other director and I'm part of the, you know, that was very unusual. And so if I were a random person in her garage, you know, will they have even answered my emails? Maybe not, right? And I, since launching Patent Pandas, I've started to hear other stories of this where people were not able to get the response. And then the case is like, yeah, sometimes these patents do go through. Sometimes they don't. If you make enough of a stink on the internet, for example, that's another way to get Google's attention. And that has happened, too, in the case of this compression algorithm from this professor in Poland, Jarek Duda. You should search his story. It's very fascinating.

But he made enough of a kind of a stink basically on various Reddit and all sorts and got the attention from the press. And then I think maybe that helped a lot to get that patent fought, but other people are not so lucky. So then the question becomes, well, so is it easy for a giant company to patent somebody's stuff? And if that happens, what do you do? And based on observation, that does happen. And perhaps it happens more frequently than we know. Well, you might not even know, right?

Yeah, right, right. Yeah, exactly. It very likely happens more often than we know, because only I was very lucky to get my story out even so in that case then there was that original question of like oh giant company has a patent on my work does that mean i won't be able to do my work well two things if you again if you did have the prior art to show that you'd been doing this all along, you can defend yourself that way. Find yourself a lawyer, certainly. But, you sue other people in order to make money or because they think the other person is a threat. And so if you're a random person, even if you are doing

research or making projects, as long as you're not cutting into the bottom line of this company or person, there's very little incentive for them to file this expensive, arduous, time-consuming process, this lawsuit at you. And so the person's kind of response, not legal advice, but, you know, kind of observations based on experience, is that there's very little reason for a giant company to come after you unless you're doing something that hurts their business. Now, if you are doing something that hurts their business, perhaps you are a successful company too, in which case you can afford the lawyers to defend you. It's not a perfect answer, certainly, but it does feel a little bit like this kind of self, not self-healing, but self-balancing mechanism where it's like either you're too poor, too broke, too little, and too insignificant for them to sue, in which case they won't. Or if you are actually making an impact, you're probably big enough to afford the legal support, which is, you know, it's not the greatest, but it helps a little bit. Yeah. And I think that's

kind of the situation that I'm in. I have one more question that may be relevant mostly because you aren't in the U.S. right now. How does U.S. patent law affect international business? That's a good question. Patent law is confined to the jurisdiction of the law, which means that a patent that you get in the U.S. only affects stuff in the U.S. So it can prevent people from using, making, or importing the product into the U.S., but it stays there. So if you wanted protection over an invention in other countries, you have to apply for a patent in all of those other countries. And you can see this gets pretty expensive pretty quick. And not all countries have like, a system that can really enforce legal protections, depending on the nation like that you're in. And so it gets, it starts to get very complex. So there's this process, like a thing that you file called a PCT.

And that basically, you do that if you want to file a patent in one country, but then reserve the right to file the patent in all the other countries as well at the same time. It gets very expensive, again, because you're filing multiple patents for the same thing in different countries. So you can file one in the in the U S in Japan in, I don't know if all of Europe versus countries in Europe. Yeah. So that's, that's where it starts to get like more, more, more complicated. And I'm certainly not the expert here either. But what that means is that, you know, if somebody, if something is patented in the U.S., for example, you could do it in a different country if it's not also patented there.

Then again, and this is where I know less, I think if there's a patent in the U.S. patent system and you're in a different country filing for a patent, I think that country's patent office may look to the U.S. office for prior art. So if the patent exists in the U.S. and you're trying to file it in country X, country X might be like, oh, but somebody already did it in the U.S. You didn't invent it. So I think that sort of thing exists. But you can't like the owner of the patent, like the U.S. patent, for example, can't go to country X and try to enforce their U.S. patent because that legal piece of paper, it's a contract that only exists in the U.S. It's like just different systems of law, right? That's why, yeah. So that's my very limited understanding of international patent law. You hit the points that I knew about, which was the U.S. patent system acts as prior art. And other people's patent systems act as our prior art.

So it's both ways. And also it comes into effect when you're importing goods that can be challenged on patented patents. Those were the only two things I really knew about. Okay, yeah, those are kind of my understanding as well. I mean, an interesting tidbit, yeah, those are kind of my understanding as well. I mean, an interesting tidbit, though, is that, like, for example, a lot of patents on medicine are in the US, but in some nations, maybe developing nations, where they actually do use the patent system for, you know, information on developing drugs and things and so it is actually a really useful kind of place to get um so like the patent the patents are actually useful for some people to get access to innovation um in the case of like creating drugs in nations that are kind of um outside the u.s patent system and and kind of, um, and don't have their own patent system, basically. Like, if you're in a place where your nation does have a developed patent system, then

I think then there is kind of the rule, the hand of the law reaches you, but that hand does not reach everywhere in the world. And so it can be a way to diffuse some innovations, oh you know of course so broad if i mean the patents are supposed to be written supposed to be big asterisk next to the supposed to be written so that someone familiar with the fields could reproduce the work and if country X wants to build the medical device or the medicine that is patented in the U.S., they don't want to export it to the U.S., they could use it internally. Patents in that way are really kind of amazing and information sharing and good. It's just all the other ways they suck. It's very complicated. It's true.

And then it's like, well, why don't you just publish it on the Internet? That's another way to share information, right? And you have to think, like, the patent system, at least in the U.S., was, like, written into the Constitution, like, when the U.S. was created. And it was made for that level of information flow now you have the web it's just there's just so different but somehow they coexist and i think that's where a lot of this um friction comes from you know yeah because we're used to moving fast and there is a a cultural shift of openness and exposing information and

information wants to be free. And that has, that is changing. I mean, it's, it's still changing really fast. So we'll see where patents end up in a hundred years. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I hope that, well, one plug in terms of things changing. There is a new project that is currently being developed called the Prior Art Archive, where anyone can submit prior art in any form. It doesn't have to be a patent that then will be reviewed by the Patent Office. It's a collaboration between MIT, the USPTO, and I believe Cisco. But the whole idea is that this will be another way in which people can submit prior art that will be viewed. But the project is still early in development, and so it's not quite set up yet. But my hope is that that will come to fruition, and then people, if they want to can

just submit here um and it'll be an extra kind of buffer for for um preventing people from from patenting open stuff basically so hopefully that comes that comes to be but it's prior art archive.org yes i'll have a link in the show notes. Cool. Well, I think we've covered many things and we've kept you for long enough. Do you have any thoughts you would like to leave us with? Yeah, I guess in my kind of experience, I'd say knowledge is power. And so go learn things. Go to patentpandas.org, priorartarchive.org if you want to check it out, the patents.stackexchange.com,

and just kind of learn about this. Even if you don't engage in it, it's useful. And just knowing things, I think makes us empowered. And having that means that you can navigate these challenges as they come up. As innovators out there, you're probably going to see this as your works become bigger and bigger and reach more people. You, I still stand by, you know, openly sharing your work because it's about getting things out into the world and not just trying to claim credit. Because as soon as you start fighting over credit, the project itself stops. That's what I've noticed. And would you rather have credit over something that nobody sees, or would you rather see your creation out in the world affecting real people, even if, you know, you're less known for it? Does it matter?

I don't know. So that's kind of things that are on my mind and maybe on yours now. Thank you so much for speaking with us, G. Thank you so much for having me. It's super fun. Our guest has been G.C., creator of Patent Pandas and Chibitronics. G is currently a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo. I'd like to thank our Patreon supporters for G's Mike and to the world at large that lets me order things from Amazon in different countries with translation software.

Thank you, Amazon Japan. Also, Tom Anderson from the Patreon Slack recommended the complete patents of Nikola Tesla, saying that it was inspiring and that he'd like to find other patents that are similarly interesting, clear, and well-written. That doesn't sound like patents at all. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And of course, thank you for listening. I'm just going to skip right to that quote to leave you with. This one from Mr. Rogers. I think G

inspired me. When I was very young, most of my heroes wore capes, flew through the air, picked up buildings with one arm. They were spectacular and they got a lot of attention. But as I grew, my heroes changed so that now I can honestly say that anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.