Intellectual Property Unleashed: The Dance of Patents and Algorithms with an update from Mathematician Noah Healy
Noah Healey returns for an engaging second installment on the Blind Knowledge podcast, diving deep into the labyrinthine world of patents and intellectual property.
The salient focus of this episode is the intricate interplay between creativity and legal protection, as Noah shares his personal experiences navigating the convoluted patent application process.
Listeners are treated to a wealth of knowledge about the different facets of intellectual property, including copyrights and trademarks, while Noah deftly illustrates the challenges and absurdities of the patent system through his own saga.
As he recounts the lengthy journey toward securing a patent—complete with unexpected twists and bureaucratic hurdles—it's clear that the road is as treacherous as it is enlightening. With a sprinkle of wit and a dash of philosophical inquiry, this conversation not only informs but also invites listeners to ponder the very nature of innovation in a world where ideas are both sacred and subject to the whims of legal interpretation.
Takeaways:
**The podcast explores the intricate world of patents, highlighting the complexity behind intellectual property rights and their implications.
**Listeners are introduced to the nuances between copyright, trademarks, and patents, emphasizing how these legal constructs govern creative works and inventions.
**Noah Healey shares firsthand experiences regarding the lengthy and often convoluted patent application process, illustrating the hurdles inventors face in securing their rights.
**The discussion sheds light on the evolving nature of patent law, particularly in the context of technological advancements and the challenges they pose to traditional legal frameworks.
**An enlightening analogy is drawn between the patenting of ideas and physical constructs, revealing how abstract concepts can become entangled in legal disputes over their validity.
**The episode emphasizes the importance of strategic claims in patent applications, showcasing how inventors must navigate the fine line between broad and specific claims to protect their inventions effectively.
Transcript
Oh, hey, what's up everybody?
Speaker A:It is Joey B.
Speaker A:Here with the Blind Knowledge podcast.
Speaker A: It is: Speaker A:Hello Japan.
Speaker A:Hello Germany.
Speaker A:Hello Asia.
Speaker A:Hello Africa.
Speaker A:Hello dlp.
Speaker A:If you're listening over there in Nigeria, good friends of ours here at Blind Knowledge, we have something special, something different.
Speaker A:This has never happened before.
Speaker A:It's huge.
Speaker A:We have Noah Healey back for part two right away.
Speaker A:So I don't know if you were with us for part one, but the episode just dropped so you can check it out.
Speaker A:He's a genius.
Speaker A:He's a real, real smart dude and we're happy to have him.
Speaker A:It's all about patents.
Speaker A:It's wild stuff with lawsuits and like really high level Supreme Court jurisdiction.
Speaker A:I'm going to let the man speak because it's.
Speaker A:I just don't want to get anything wrong here.
Speaker A:This dude knows.
Speaker A:Noah, what's up man?
Speaker B:Hey Joe.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's a.
Speaker B:It's a crazy thing and it's been going on for actually a lot longer then I've been pursuing core disk and I've been wrapped up into it.
Speaker B:I might have the craziest story in patent history, but it might just be how crazy everything is now.
Speaker A:What's going on?
Speaker B:So the first thing I think is to sort of set the stage of what patents are and what sort of intellectual property is just to give a sense.
Speaker B:Because people tend to think of everything working the way that music and movies works, but those things aren't really the way they are because of laws there, that way, because of a lot of contracts and union negotiations and so on.
Speaker B:So there's sort of four big kinds of intellectual property and those are copyright, trademark trade secrets, and patents.
Speaker B:Copyright is basically on information.
Speaker B:So every kind of artistic expression, this recording of us, anytime you write a book or an article or a list for the grocery store, those things are all copyrighted.
Speaker A:My list for the grocery store is copyrighted.
Speaker A:Really?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Copyright used to be much, much more restrictive.
Speaker B:So for example, It's a Wonderful Life became incredibly popular because the.
Speaker B:At that time, in order to be copyrighted, there had to be a copyright notice on every single instance of a copyrighted work.
Speaker B:And one of the film reels for It's a Wonderful Life was printed without that copyright notice, which meant that the entire film was public domain.
Speaker B:And that allowed television stations to be able to get content by putting a Frank Capra movie on during Christmas.
Speaker B:And so they did in abundance.
Speaker B:I can recall one time visiting an aunt and uncle in Fairfax, where they had a very large number of local network TV stations when I was a child.
Speaker B:So this would have been early 80s.
Speaker B:And we were watching It's a Wonderful Life and some cousins came in and we changed the channel back to another presentation of It's a Wonderful Life on a different station that was earlier so that they could watch it from the beginning, because there were at least four different versions of It's a Wonderful Life just having started at different times, all casting at the same time.
Speaker B:So that's copyright.
Speaker B:It's been changed so that it's automatic.
Speaker B:Although if you were to attempt to enforce the 90 years after the author's death clause on your grocery list, you'd have to do a little bit more work than just, you know, having written it down and, you know, dropped it underneath the couch sign.
Speaker A:Or would you have to say like this is copywritten or is it just automatically copywritten?
Speaker B:Literally everything you create is basically automatically copywritten.
Speaker B:But you can register copyrights and if you intend to actually get commercial use out of them, that's a really good idea.
Speaker A:Okay, and why It's a.
Speaker B:It's a good idea basically because it solves dispute issues.
Speaker A:Okay, so it's just a one, one stop shop.
Speaker A:Here's the copyright.
Speaker A:Right, end of dispute.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:So, for example, when J.K. rowling was on her first book tour through America, one of the things that she found surprising, fans would come up to give her things.
Speaker B:And there was actually somebody from the publisher that was assigned to take those things from the fans.
Speaker B:And so after, you know, a couple hours, she asked, you know, what's going on?
Speaker B:Like, why can't I take things close to people?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And they told her that that's a protective measure.
Speaker B:Some of these people are going to hand you manuscripts so that they can create foundation for suing you later for infringing copyright.
Speaker B:And so for legal reasons, we are arranging the circumstances so that you will have not received anything from anybody in order to basically be able to throw those cases out of court.
Speaker A:Right, okay, yeah, I follow you 100.
Speaker A:That's wild.
Speaker B:So after copyright, one of the most prevalent parts of intellectual property is trademark.
Speaker B:Trademark, unlike most forms of copyright, doesn't fall out of use, but it has to be defended.
Speaker A:So they're lifetime or they're.
Speaker B:No, they're forever.
Speaker B:If you create a trademark and that trademark continues to be defended by say, your descendants or some company that you sell the trademark to, then as long as they continue to defend and use that trademark, and it does not pass into common usage, then it remains.
Speaker B:This is why, for example, Google executives will never refer to googling something and will only refer to using the Google search function or some other fairly stylized form of address.
Speaker A:That's like.
Speaker A:So that's beyond smart.
Speaker A:That's Google's just covering every base.
Speaker A:That's crazy, right?
Speaker B:And of course, the degree to which humanity decides to use Google as a.
Speaker B:As a synonym for the.
Speaker B:The concept of search, if it becomes generally accepted that that is the case, Google's trademark on the word Google would actually go away because you're not allowed to trademark generally used words.
Speaker B:So, for example, Campbell's couldn't trademark soup everyone.
Speaker B:You know soup is a word that means things.
Speaker B:Everyone's allowed to sell soup.
Speaker A:Yeah, but it's different.
Speaker A:I think when I think soup, I don't just automatically think Campbell's.
Speaker A:It's like when you think looking up search, you think Google.
Speaker A:Or maybe that's just my brain.
Speaker B:Well, many people do.
Speaker B:And of course that's a large amount of Alphabet's value proposition is that.
Speaker B:Is that people think that way.
Speaker B:But for trademark purposes, their lawyers would really prefer to sort of have their cake and eat it too.
Speaker A:Yeah, they're Google.
Speaker A:They have their hands on everything.
Speaker A:I love Google.
Speaker A:They're also just the spawn of Satan sometimes too.
Speaker A:So patents.
Speaker A:Patents are a big deal.
Speaker A:You know about patents?
Speaker B:So patents are weird.
Speaker B:The first and most important thing if you're trying to get a patent is that it can't be published.
Speaker B:Once it's public knowledge, it's not patentable anymore.
Speaker A:So once it's not blind knowledge, like once it's known knowledge, you can't be patented.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:And when you apply for a patent, unless you pay a fee, an early part of the application process is actually publishing the patent that you're applying for.
Speaker B:So the act of applying for a patent in a standard fashion will actually render that idea unpatentable outside of the existing scope of.
Speaker B:Of the thing being pursued.
Speaker A:Yeah, and you kind of mentioned that in the last interview too, where there's like a whole process.
Speaker B:Well, so yeah, there's basically two ways to get started.
Speaker B:I've.
Speaker B:I've sort of done the entire soup to nuts.
Speaker B:So I actually got started with a provisional patent application.
Speaker B:And this is a thing that you can do to essentially establish your priority.
Speaker B:It's a fairly simple form.
Speaker B:The description can be relatively vague, and you really only need to be able to draw a line from what you're describing to what your eventual patent application entails.
Speaker B:So there's there's some wiggle room in there.
Speaker B:You can kind of be like if you're in research or something like that and you start seeing this possibility that something might be a good idea, you can file provisional patent for sort of space around the thing that you're dealing with.
Speaker B:And then if it turns out that you've got a good idea, then you can go ahead and patent that.
Speaker B:On the other hand, if that isn't the case.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Then.
Speaker B:Then you can just let it go.
Speaker B:So a lot of provisionals get filed defensively or even offensively by major corporations in order to try to wall off areas that working in or want to be working in in the future.
Speaker B:And that gives you one year in order to file the full patent application without losing your priority.
Speaker A:Interesting.
Speaker B:I did a provisional basically so I could talk to people and try to find an attorney that I could actually work with.
Speaker A:If you have the provisional, does that give you first running until.
Speaker B:Yes, yes.
Speaker B:So that it establishes, it establishes your priority and in fact establishes when the patent begins.
Speaker B:So it's another interesting thing.
Speaker B:Your patent start date starts at the time that you file the patent.
Speaker B:But the force of your patent doesn't start until after your patent is accepted.
Speaker A:And since they take a long time, don't they?
Speaker B:About three years.
Speaker A:Oh, Jesus.
Speaker B:From filing of the patent application, which if you filed a provisional, waited a year, then filed a patent application, that could be four years.
Speaker A:Years.
Speaker A:Three to four years.
Speaker A:That's wild.
Speaker B:Yes, that's, that's just, that's we're, we're getting the first tastes of just how crazy things are.
Speaker B:Three years in patent world.
Speaker A:You wouldn't waiting three years.
Speaker A:And then all these things have just been happening basically.
Speaker B:More or less.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So once you file your patent application again, unless you file a fee in order to speed things up, it takes them six months to assign a patent examiner to it.
Speaker B:And this is the person that you're going to have to convince that you should get a patent at the time of the assignment.
Speaker B:That is when they actually publish on their website your patent application.
Speaker B:So for me this was 18 months into the process.
Speaker B:Part of that process is deciding what division of the patent office this actually belongs to.
Speaker B:So for example, if you invent a new part for cars, that wouldn't be, you know, being looked at by a civil engineer.
Speaker B:It'd be looked at by some sort of automotive engineer.
Speaker A:Different specialist.
Speaker A:Yep.
Speaker B:So the different departments have different backed upness.
Speaker B:It ranges from 24 to 36 months on average for each different department.
Speaker B:The zone I was in which was sort of these financial business process patents has a 32 month waiting time.
Speaker A:32 Months.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:Well, it's been a long time.
Speaker A:Obviously you've been, you've been sitting, waiting.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:What do you do?
Speaker A:Probably not thinking about it, I'm guessing.
Speaker B:So I was, I was working on some other things.
Speaker B:I also picked up a day job in order to be able to keep going.
Speaker A:That's what's up.
Speaker A:That makes sense.
Speaker B:But then you get what's known as your first office action and there's a sort of a dance that the patent office and lawyers have established.
Speaker B:Copyright is a relatively specific thing.
Speaker B:Again, you know, Harry Potter is very famous.
Speaker B:You could write another story about a boy wizard.
Speaker B:I mean Harry Potter was not the first childhood coming of age wizard story by a long stretch.
Speaker B:And there's been a lot that have come out since Harry Potter came out.
Speaker B:And if you wanted to write another one, you could not, you know, go for it.
Speaker B:But with a patent, you sort of want to build a fence around your idea so that people can't lightly tweak it and, and encroach upon what you're doing.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker A:You have your certain, there's certain parts of that that are yours.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker B:That gets quite tricky because obviously you would like to take as much as possible and the patent office would like to grant you as little as possible.
Speaker B:And so there's sort of a negotiation there.
Speaker B:So the kind of established dance is that in your claims, what you do is sort of in your first claim, you, you claim sort of everything, the entire universe.
Speaker B:And then you narrow down your claims until you get down to the claims that are actually regarding your actual patent, which again you try to stretch as broadly as possible.
Speaker B:So for example, what you do is you sort of write this massively over broad patent that still contains your actual claims.
Speaker B:The patent office disallows that patent for being overly broad.
Speaker B:But says you, these are, are good claims.
Speaker B:And then you rewrite the broad claims as dependent clauses of your actual claims.
Speaker B:So you wouldn't claim a ballpoint pen.
Speaker B:You would claim sort of every universe that could contain ballpoint pens, which are this specific thing.
Speaker B:So that gives you your very wide fence that's still actually constrained to your actual idea.
Speaker B:And this is where I kind of stepped on their toes because the claim language in my patent was too specific.
Speaker B:So the attorneys had included several integral equation formulas.
Speaker B:I kind of stepped out of, out of the dance at that point and made them not just do the thing that you normally do to get your patent and continue to spread the language.
Speaker B:So we had to go back and forth a couple of times.
Speaker B:The other thing that's quite common is that the patent office will claim prior art.
Speaker B:They'll basically just say there's nothing new under the sun.
Speaker B:Here's some stuff that is your idea.
Speaker B:And in general what they do, according to the people I've spoken to, and certainly this happened to me, is they'll find some keywords in your patent.
Speaker B:In my case, one of the critical ones was paramutual and get some patents that reference that keyword and are just books.
Speaker B:So they came up with something that they referred to as the Lang patent.
Speaker B:It was three guys and they effectively patented every single kind of para mutual betting scheme that they could imagine.
Speaker B:Their patent was eventually bought by the Hong Kong Jockey Club and the CME Group, but the patent application itself was hundreds of pages long.
Speaker B:And it's essentially all a scholarly mathematical work on the properties of paramusual systems.
Speaker B:That's where I had to step in with my expertise and demonstrate why my patent was not treading on their patent.
Speaker B:And this is actually something that's technically useful for people to know.
Speaker B:There's a concept called teaching away.
Speaker B:So if in the course of describing the limits of your patent you are specifically excluding something, then other claims, other patents that are referring to that thing that you're teaching away from are sort of automatically excluded.
Speaker B:So imagine a world where tables didn't exist and you were patenting tables for the first time.
Speaker B:And in the course of describing what a table was, you pointed out that one of the key, you know, like properties of a table is that it had four legs because obviously tables couldn't have any number of legs other than four.
Speaker B:If a second person were to then come in and patent a three legged, two legged, one legged, five legged, six legged tables, they would be able to invalidate your patent as prior art because you were teaching away from the concept of non four legged tables.
Speaker A:Imagine how many people over the years have sent in patents on like, like that, like a table.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:No, you've had a long struggle with this patenting.
Speaker A:It can take up to 32 months.
Speaker A:With your actual category of patents, you have, you know, done everything you needed to do.
Speaker A:After 18 months something happened.
Speaker A:Go for it.
Speaker A:No, you got it.
Speaker A:I was just trying to.
Speaker B:Yes, just keep us.
Speaker B:So that's where we are.
Speaker B:So I'm looking through the Lang patent, which is hundreds of pages of, of mathematics describing the structure of every possible pari mutual system that they can imagine.
Speaker B:There are two saving graces.
Speaker B:One, and I believe it was section eight of the patent.
Speaker B:They point out that their system only works for up to countably infinite pool sets for the pari mutual system.
Speaker B:So this gets into a branch of mathematics that was started in the 19th century, Cantor set theory, where mathematics decided that infinity was actually an interesting structure and that there were different levels and sizes of infinities and that countable infinity was the smallest one.
Speaker A:No, I'm here, but I just want.
Speaker A:I gotta stretch out because that's crazy.
Speaker A:You said there's multiple infinities.
Speaker B:Yes, yes.
Speaker B:There's more than the infinite number that you're thinking about of infinities.
Speaker A:In fact, my brain just exploded.
Speaker B:It has that effect on some people.
Speaker B:So they were claiming every single set of pari mutual games where there was up to an infinite number of outcomes possible.
Speaker B:My system is actually working in functional space which belongs to a few orders up of infinity from countable.
Speaker B:So I was explicitly dealing with a larger scale of infinity than they were dealing with.
Speaker B:So that teaching away thing kicks in and as a result of essentially one sentence in this over 500 page long patent, it was completely invalidated because of.
Speaker A:A bigger definition of infinity.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:The other fun thing is that my para mutual system, they were describing betting systems that were all either zero sum or negative sum where there'd be a rake for the operator.
Speaker B:My system actually had a add in from the operator and so could be considered posi mutual if that were a word.
Speaker B:But it isn't.
Speaker B:So we had to go back and forth a couple of times on those issues.
Speaker B:They did dig up another try.
Speaker B:There were some meteorologists that patented a technique for hurricane insurance based on betting markets.
Speaker B:Essentially people in hurricane active areas would bet on their own houses to be hit by hurricanes and that would become a pari mutual pool that would then create an insurance policy so that if your house was hit by a hurricane, that is you won the pool, there would be enough money in the pool to pay for your repairs.
Speaker A:Say you won if you got hit by a hurricane or your homestead.
Speaker A:Rather.
Speaker B:Well, that's.
Speaker B:That's how insurance works, basically.
Speaker A:No, no, no, I totally get that.
Speaker A:I worked in health insurance for almost seven years now.
Speaker B:There you go.
Speaker A:It's just tough to be positive about that.
Speaker B:But it definitely is.
Speaker A:Yeah, it'd be crazy if there was like a pool like that.
Speaker A:Maybe there is.
Speaker A:People bet on anything.
Speaker B:That patent was abandoned.
Speaker B:I don't know that it's actually gone anywhere.
Speaker B:But that was, that was another thing that they brought up as potential prior art.
Speaker B: So at any rate, late: Speaker A:Okay, this is a good thing, correct?
Speaker B:That's a pretty good thing.
Speaker B:So the next stage of patents, once you get a notice of acceptance, you can take that notice of acceptance.
Speaker B:The patent terms for which they've issued the notice, acceptance, put those in, and then they'll give you the patent.
Speaker B:There's a.
Speaker A:You're almost there.
Speaker B:Almost there.
Speaker B:Yes, almost there.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:There's a.
Speaker B:There's a short time window.
Speaker B:If you don't apply for the patent during that time window, then it goes away.
Speaker B:The notice of acceptance basically expires, and the patent's been published at that point.
Speaker B:So at that point, nobody will be able to patent this.
Speaker B:So at this point, my examiner's supervisor calls my patent attorney, and patent attorneys generally have relationships with these people that's sort of part of their job and tells my attorney that there's something going on and that they're not going to be honoring the notice of acceptance.
Speaker B:Now, this is rare.
Speaker B:There's a procedure for doing this that's not the procedure.
Speaker B:We don't hear anything else back from them, and we're sort of in limbo.
Speaker B:I pay the fee to actually do the application just so that it's in under the line, because they haven't been talking to us.
Speaker B:And so we.
Speaker B:We put in the application.
Speaker B:Then about a month after the due date had passed, we get another call saying, yeah, that.
Speaker B:That didn't happen.
Speaker B:You know, here's the refund.
Speaker B:We're going to have to, you know, get back to you.
Speaker B:And a few months after that, they came back with yet another objection.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:There were a couple of technical issues in the objection, Some like commas in the wrong place.
Speaker B:So my lawyer said, that's not a big deal.
Speaker B:We can fix that.
Speaker B:But the big deal was they were now saying that it wasn't patentable material.
Speaker B:So that's where.
Speaker B:That's where the saga starts widening out a little bit.
Speaker B:Yeah, because what is or is not patentable is actually a floating line.
Speaker B:It's not really well understood.
Speaker B:Right now the controlling law is fairly old, and there's been a couple of supreme court decisions that have changed things around a bit.
Speaker B:But the last one of those was quite a while ago now, and patents went through a cycle where in the early days of the computer generation, there were no patents available on software or sort of anything other than physical computer.
Speaker A:Hardware, because they never had before because.
Speaker B:They'd Never existed before.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker A:Just didn't exist.
Speaker A:That makes sense.
Speaker B:So for example, Sun Microsystems, which Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Google after it went public, he was also the CEO of Sun Microsystems.
Speaker B:They got their start out of Berkeley and they had effectively designed a completely new operating system and suite of desktop tools on top of a Unix processor.
Speaker B:So when they were going to go form the company, the school has the rights to intellectual property that's produced under their, you know, auspices while, while their facilities and so on.
Speaker B:So they had a patent attorney take a look at their product, which was a computer, and he, he had them take the lid off, he looked inside, the chips and everything else were all standard off the shelf components.
Speaker B:And so he said, nope, no intellectual property here.
Speaker B:Good to go.
Speaker B:So by the time Google came along, they weren't being that cavalier anymore.
Speaker A:Yeah, I.
Speaker A:Not.
Speaker A:Yeah, they.
Speaker A:That's its own, that's its own wildness in itself.
Speaker A:Like I was born in 86, basically that the.
Speaker A: the computer came out in like: Speaker B:Pretty much the, the relatively common desktops were.
Speaker B:Yeah, late 70s to mid-80s is, depending on what you count, is relatively common.
Speaker A:There were like these massive boxes.
Speaker A:Like they weren't.
Speaker B:Well, televisions were a lot bigger back then too.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:So that kind of stuff happened and it was basically decided that software patents were okay.
Speaker B:And so software patents sort of poured out of the tech world.
Speaker B:Probably far too many.
Speaker B: So for example, in the early: Speaker B:And what they had patented was using a restroom.
Speaker B:If you've ever used a bathroom, you should thank IB for allowing that public domain patent so that they wouldn't restrict you from having done that.
Speaker B:They weren't actually patenting the process of eliminating in a restroom.
Speaker B:What they did was they were patenting queuing algorithms ways to line things up and then service a line.
Speaker B:And similar to the Lang patent, they patented every kind of queuing algorithm they could imagine.
Speaker B:But they patented queuing algorithms specifically for choosing the order in which to use a restroom.
Speaker B:And their description of queuing algorithms was general enough that if you have ever used a restroom, you used one of the algorithms that they were describing.
Speaker B:So at any rate, some Supreme Court cases happened, some other lower court cases happened, and people started to decide that software patents maybe shouldn't be quite so broad a thing.
Speaker A:Okay, I started to squeeze in that fence a bit.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:And so this day and age software type patents are specifically allowed under the terms where you're creating a better system or a better thing and that is, is better at the algorithmic level.
Speaker B:And so their claim that my particle.
Speaker A:Level, for anyone joining us and didn't hear our first interview.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:That's where I was able to again get out my, my algorithmist hat and show them the math about how, how and why my system actually performs better.
Speaker A:Yeah, and like you're the guy too, to do that, which is perfect.
Speaker A:I mean, how it's going to be hard for them to fight you on that.
Speaker A:I would think maybe we don't want to go too far into that.
Speaker B:I would, I would think so.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B: government server in which in: Speaker B:However, at the same time another court case has happened and that is American Axle versus neepco Holdings.
Speaker B:So American Axle is a company that developed a way to create this sort of cardboard tube to go inside an axle in order to damp vibration in multiple modes.
Speaker B:So they're a, they're a small company and they applied for a patent on that.
Speaker B:There's another company called neepco holdings and according to documents that were released during the discovery process, when they saw that patent, they sent their engineering team an email that said figure out how this works and start doing it.
Speaker B:So they did.
Speaker B:And since neepco is a big company, they had greater manufacturing and so they were outselling American Axle.
Speaker B:So American Axle sued them with their patent because what a patent grants you the rights to do is deny other people access to your idea.
Speaker A:That makes sense.
Speaker A:I mean, that's what, I mean obviously that's what a patent is.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker B:Right, right.
Speaker A:It's going to be.
Speaker A:To reiterate that fact for sure.
Speaker B:So they brought the suit.
Speaker B:The judge basically decided that it wasn't relevant whether or not NEPCO had violated the patent.
Speaker B:But because the.
Speaker B:Since American Axles patent references physical phenomenon like vibrations, it wasn't.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:They were attempting to patent physics in general and therefore the patent wasn't grantable.
Speaker A:See, here's what I'm worried about for you, Noah, is what if someone jumps in in front of you?
Speaker A:What if someone is doing the same thing or thinking about the same kind of stuff you're thinking about designing and pops in there and is like, did Put in their patent two.
Speaker A:Two years ago.
Speaker B:My.
Speaker B:My priority was actually established by the initial patent filing at the preliminary.
Speaker B:So if they were.
Speaker B:Done it two years ago.
Speaker B:I am almost seven years into this process now.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:Are you.
Speaker A:How confident are you that this is gonna.
Speaker A:That you're gonna storm home?
Speaker B:I'm.
Speaker B:I'm mostly just winging it.
Speaker B:My attorneys give me three chances, and four.
Speaker B:Three out of four at this point.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:I should have just asked.
Speaker A:What are the odds?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:The Patent office has violated its own procedures.
Speaker B:They have actually made false statements to my congressional office.
Speaker B:I. I asked my congressional office to look into what was going on.
Speaker B:And so they created basically, a form letter, which I've been told isn't really what they're supposed to do.
Speaker B:But that form letter actually has sort of material statements of fact incorrect in terms of the timeline of what happened.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker B:They didn't.
Speaker B:They don't mention the first notice of acceptance issuance, which is essentially what they did.
Speaker B:Instead of withdrawing that notice of acceptance, they acted like they'd never issued it in the first place.
Speaker A:All right, so they're assholes, and they screwed up royally.
Speaker A:And you caught them.
Speaker B:More or less.
Speaker A:Do they know that you know this stuff?
Speaker B:I believe so.
Speaker B:My attorneys made it very clear in the appeals filing.
Speaker A:Okay, good, good.
Speaker A:Well, power to the people.
Speaker A:Power to Noah and his attorneys.
Speaker A:I hope it works out.
Speaker A:Well, I think it will.
Speaker A:I asked that question because I didn't know if we have to jump off the live stream and have to delete everything, so.
Speaker B:No, no, no, no.
Speaker B:It's all good.
Speaker A:Good.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:And you're smart enough to know not to talk about this stuff on a live stream with some dude.
Speaker A:Anyway, so.
Speaker A:Of the Blind Knowledge podcast.
Speaker A:Thanks for listening and watching the craziness.
Speaker B:That might be going on that might just be causing my thing to go crazy.
Speaker B:American Axle appealed their.
Speaker B:Their vacation of patent to the appeals court.
Speaker B:Since they.
Speaker B:They got their patent, they actually wanted to have it, and then they wanted it enforced.
Speaker B:So the appeals court basically wrote up something to the district judge saying, we're not going to overturn you, but the way that you overturn this patent implies that maybe things aren't patentable at all.
Speaker B:So maybe you'd like to rewrite your opinion, because if you're not allowed to patent things that reference physics, then you're not allowed to patent, you know, things in our universe because everything references physics.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So they sent that back down to him, and he took a look at it and wrote an opinion that that can pretty much be summarized as, nope, I'm right.
Speaker B:It's all fine.
Speaker B:So American Axel then appealed that to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, yeah, we'll hear that.
Speaker B:That filing.
Speaker A:Wait, this was recently.
Speaker B:This was almost two years ago now.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's pretty recent.
Speaker B:So the court hadn't gotten it scheduled.
Speaker B:The next cycle of the court, which is basically last year's cycle, came up.
Speaker B:They didn't schedule it.
Speaker B:During this period of it remaining on their docket unscheduled, large numbers of amicus briefs came in from many different angles.
Speaker B:And in this last cycle of the court, they unscheduled it.
Speaker B:And so they are, in fact, not going to hear it after all.
Speaker B:This is quite rare.
Speaker B:This was also highly controversial, which makes it rarer.
Speaker B:Usually, if there's a lot of interest, the court's more likely to step in, but in this case, they stepped back.
Speaker B:That means that this ruling that arguably argues that things that are real aren't patentable is the controlling precedent for patents in the United States.
Speaker A:Okay, so we've gone totally top level.
Speaker A:So now you can't patent things, is your argument, I mean, well, that might.
Speaker B:Might be what the judiciary has said.
Speaker B:So mine is not a Supreme Court trial.
Speaker B:I probably have about a year until my case will be heard.
Speaker A:So you wait another year now that, now that all this madness has happened, you have appealed, you feel strongly about it, and now you got to wait another year.
Speaker B:It's a one to two year wait for the appeal for me.
Speaker B:And it's been about six months since the appeal was filed.
Speaker B:I've considered going out of my mind, but it just doesn't seem to be productive.
Speaker A:That's the most honest thing I've heard all day.
Speaker A:I'm sure that's awesome.
Speaker A:It's a trip.
Speaker A:That's a trip for sure.
Speaker A:So does that limit you from talking about the project to working on the project from anything like that?
Speaker B:Not in any way.
Speaker B:If the patent is ultimately granted, then it'll be granted and I'll have the enforcement powers.
Speaker B:If the patent ultimately isn't granted, then I was never going to have the patent and I would never have enforcement powers.
Speaker B:So I'm doing my best to move forward as.
Speaker B:As things stand.
Speaker A:That's fair.
Speaker A:You could write a book about this.
Speaker A:Literally.
Speaker A:This could be an insert.
Speaker A:This should be an insert in a.
Speaker A:In like a college law magazine.
Speaker B:It may come to that.
Speaker B:I have, I've spoken to a number of people who work in the patent space and a number of people who have gotten Patents having two notices of acceptances denied is not something that anyone has ever heard of before.
Speaker A:But is it illegal for them to do that?
Speaker A:Is it just bad business?
Speaker B:It's possible that it's illegal, particularly by.
Speaker B:By vacating their own procedures.
Speaker B:So it.
Speaker B:It might not be illegal, strictly speaking, but since they've.
Speaker B:Since they violated their own procedures doing it the first time.
Speaker B:Government agencies are not allowed to violate their own rules in the prosecution of their duties.
Speaker B:And in fact, you know, civil rights and double jeopardy is.
Speaker B:Is part of the appeal that we're making.
Speaker A:I know that part.
Speaker A:Yes, yes, yes, it certainly is.
Speaker A:I don't know what I'm going to do if I'm.
Speaker A:You.
Speaker A:I'm trying to think like, what does Noah do for another two years?
Speaker A:What are you going to do?
Speaker A:I guess I should ask the man himself.
Speaker A:He's.
Speaker A:Well, you're right there.
Speaker B:So I've been pursuing a policy of having this be open source overseas because there's no such thing as a global patent.
Speaker A:The ODS of market economics.
Speaker B:Yeah, you can get patents everywhere if you want to, but the different jurisdictions all count as separate jurisdictions, so you have to go through each of those jurisdictions.
Speaker B:Pet patent processes.
Speaker B:There are some streamlines where other countries will recognize that, say, the US or the EU or Japan or other places have well respected patent processes.
Speaker B:And so receiving the patent there sort of streamlines the process through their system, but it won't save you fees, for example.
Speaker A:And so if it's not patented there.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:In point of fact, what a patent does isn't grant you the right to use your idea, it grants you the right to stop other people from using your idea.
Speaker A:Let me rephrase then.
Speaker A:For.
Speaker A:For better.
Speaker A:This is a better question.
Speaker A:Would you do business in another country with your product without having a patent?
Speaker B:Absolutely, under any one of several things.
Speaker B:In fact, currently, all of the projects that I'm sort of, you know, fanning the embers of are outside the United States.
Speaker B:One of the people I'm working with intends to move the United States and set up.
Speaker A:Okay, well, other than that.
Speaker A:Outlier.
Speaker A:I mean, that's.
Speaker A:So you got a lot of things.
Speaker A:You got a lot of cookies in the cookie jars.
Speaker B:I certainly hope so.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker A:That's good.
Speaker A:And that's what we need from Noah Healey.
Speaker A:We need them out there making algorithms, winning lawsuits, and making the world a better place, one marketplace at a time.
Speaker B:And if I can expose the absurdity of the patent system while I'm on the way, maybe that'll help some things out.
Speaker B:As well.
Speaker A:Noah Healey, everybody.
Speaker A:Noah Healey.
Speaker A:There's no stage or applause and I don't have any plus sound effects, but if I had one, I'd put it on Noah, because it was.
Speaker A:It was rad.
Speaker A:That was rad.
Speaker A:Thank you so much for joining me, man.
Speaker B:I appreciate it.
Speaker A:Before you go, just gonna lower this funky music real quick.
Speaker A:Before you go, where can people find you?
Speaker A:Where can people talk to you?
Speaker A:What if someone loves algorithms or needs a patent or just wants to hang and talk to Noah from for a sec.
Speaker A:Where do they go to connect with you?
Speaker B:Well, you can reach out to me directly@noah p.healyahoo.com.
Speaker B:I've got a website at Core Disc, C O R D I S C, which also has a contact page on it.
Speaker B:And you can also find me on LinkedIn.
Speaker B:I'm just plain old Noah Healey on LinkedIn.
Speaker B:Happy to get a connect.
Speaker B:And yeah, if you're interested in having an economy or learning more about the most important algorithms in the world, reach out.
Speaker A:That's cool.
Speaker A:The economy part's pretty important, you know?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I. I think so.
Speaker B:And also, if anybody has a crazier patent story than me.
Speaker B:Yeah, reach out with that one too, because I think right now I'm.
Speaker B:I'm top of the world, but maybe somebody's in even worse shape than me.
Speaker A:If there is any crazier patent story out there, we're gonna need to know about it for sure.
Speaker A:If you reach out to Noah, reach out to us at blind knowledge as wellblindknowledge.com and go from there.
Speaker A:Then click one of the links.
Speaker A:You'll email me somehow, just you know how to do it.
Speaker A:Everyone knows how to do it.
Speaker A:Just go to blindknowledge.com, hit the contact us button, and you'll contact me.
Speaker A:And if there's absolutely no one in the world that is more crazier effed up patent story than Noah.
Speaker A:But if there is.
Speaker A:Yeah, we're gonna need to have you on too.
Speaker A:For sure.
Speaker A:For sure.
Speaker A:And Noah, if.
Speaker A:If that happens, you gotta come on too.
Speaker A:So you guys can debate.
Speaker A:Absolutely the number one patent guy or woman, who knows you're gonna win.
Speaker A:Noah, don't worry about it.
Speaker A:All faith and confidence on this end, man.
Speaker A:Have.
Speaker A:Have a good night.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, you too.
Speaker A:All right, man.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:My name is Joey B.
Speaker A:This is Blind Knowledge podcast.
Speaker A:I am going to leave you here and now.
Speaker A:And that's all I got.
Speaker A:Have a great night, everybody.
Speaker A:I'll leave you with this.
Speaker B:We'll see you.
Speaker A:Maybe tomorrow,.
Speaker B:Sam.
