Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Infinite Future. I'm Todd Thomas and today we're exploring the innovations shaping tomorrow's world. You're watching Now Media tv.
Welcome to Infinite Future. I'm Todd Thomas.
When people think about innovation, they often focus on inventors, entrepreneurs, startups and breakthrough technologies.
But behind every major technological revolution lies an invisible system that determines whether innovations flourish or or stall.
Today's guest is Dr. Julie Burke. She is an author, speaker, recognized authority on the US Patent Office procedures. She's a trusted advisor to Petition AI and she's a contributor of in depth investigative pieces featured on IP Watchdog.
She has published Thought Leadership on Law360 with guest articles that have ranked among the Most ever read.
Dr. Burke is a patent consultant, founder of IP Quality Pro LLC and she's a registered patent agent and one of the most influential voices in the national conversation about patent quality, intellectual property and innovation policy.
For nearly two decades, Julie worked inside the United States Patent and Trademark Office advocating for policy improvements and patent quality reforms.
Today, she advises innovators, technology companies, policymakers and industry leaders on the future of intellectual property and innovation.
Dr. Burke, welcome to Infinite Future.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Todd. And please do call me Julie.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Julie, you got it.
Now, Julie, I know that you mentioned you have a little disclaimer you'd like to throw out there as we get started. This would probably be a great time.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: I just want the world to know I am not a patent attorney. And anything you hear on this show, please do not construe it as patent legal advice. And if you have patent questions, please don't home grow this. Please get registered patent attorney help every step of the way. You wouldn't do brain surgery on yourself, would you?
Value your ip?
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Great advice. Great advice.
As we begin, I want viewers to consider this question.
Can a nation remain a technology leader if its innovation systems fail to protect and accelerate innovation?
In this first segment, we're exploring why intellectual property remains one of the most important but least understood drivers of innovation.
So Julie, why should innovators, entrepreneurs and technology leaders care about the patent system?
[00:02:45] Speaker B: Ideas are cheap, a dime a dozen. Bringing them to life is incredibly expensive. The patent system turns raw ingenuity into your legal asset. It's very important to shield your R and D investments and it's a magnet that attracts venture capital.
Without that, you're just fueling your competitors next project product.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Well, one of my favorite expressions is execution is the chariot of genius. And I think that probably plays into, into your description there.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yes, yes.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: So how does intellectual property influence the Pace of innovation and economic growth.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: It's, it's under, under comprehended.
That's not even a phrase. Intellectual property is the engine room for economic growth. You get a temporary license for exclusivity. You can stop other people from making and using your product or your method for a short period of time. 20 years is not a very long period of time. But in exchange for that, you publicly disclose how your invention works, how it can be made, how, how you came up with it. And with that information, other inventors, other researchers, other producers out there can take the next step, use your blueprint, take the next step to create additional inventions and have that be their invention that they get patented.
Right now, the hurdle innovators face is a huge patent application backlog.
The USPTO is running 800,000 patent applications unexamined at this moment.
With two years, two and a half years time period from when you file your application to when you get your very first indication. Might there be an invention here?
The examining corps is demoralized, overworked, and it's very uncertain whether any patent that issues right now would sustain any sort of litigation. We're quite in a crisis state.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Given today's accelerated rate of technical technological advancements, a two and a half year delay seems like multiple generations of technology.
I think that must be a huge discouragement from innovators and entrepreneurs and even beginning that process.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: It is, it truly is. And it's a race that we're losing to.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: China's an interesting conversation. I've talked with lots of entrepreneurs that will file for US Patents and potentially European patents, but they don't even bother in Asian countries because they think they're unenforceable.
So when you bring up China, what's your, what is your insight on that?
[00:05:51] Speaker B: We're playing checkers and China is playing chess. China's winning too. This is a very interesting time period. My background's biotech chem pharma. I'm not a national security person in any way, shape or form, but in the last couple years I've uncovered through my own research some real disparities with how applications at the United States State's Patent and Trademark Office are handled if they're filed by Chinese entities, including watch listed Chinese entities. And it's quite scary to see how they fly through the office with patents way before American inventor applications are even picked up for examination.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: That's alarming and sounds quite nefarious.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: It's unsettling to the point that Congress has proposed a bill prohibiting adversarial Patent acts. It first was proposed in 2023, went nowhere. Very hard to get any kind of legislative change in Congress, but especially on some issues that are so complex and at some level kind of boring. Patent rights, who cares? It's hard to catch anybody's attention. Tension.
This has just been circulated around and come up again last month. Congress has again floated out this Preventing Adversarials Patent Act. It'd be wonderful. It would get some teeth here.
The premise of this, well, you know, our government has sanctions against Chinese entities that are under, you know, the military control, under the Communist Party. We know the names of those entities. And business people in America cannot do business.
They cannot get their chips from these companies.
We're working around all these sidesteps. All the while that's happening. Nothing has stopped the United States Patent and Trademark Office from issuing thousands and thousands of patents to watch listed Chinese entities. Huawei inspir things on the Department of Defense 1260H list for sanctioned technologies that you think, why are we giving DJI another patent for a drone that can carry bombs in urban areas? Why are we doing this?
That's what we're up against right now. Big loophole in our national security posture. On one hand, China, you can't do business with us. On the other hand, here's our intellectual property rights we're giving you.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: So the watch list prevents US businesses from doing business with these companies, but it doesn't prevent those companies from filing for patents. Patents. And what you're suggesting is not only can they file for those patents, but somehow those patents are moving faster through the system than US based patents.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Yes. Let's talk about speed for just a few minutes. There's a program called patent prosecution Highway PPH program where an applicant, if he's had his patent filed someplace else in the world and gets a favorable review, an allowance in Europe, Canada, China, you can come to the United States and file claims very similar to that. The idea is, well, if another country found it patentable, surely there must be some invention there and it would save work on the patent offices, harmonize the work effort worldwide. To be clear, there is no one international patent. An inventor would need to patent in each state or in some cases regions, the European Union. You can get one patent for the European Union to cover your rights there.
The difficulty herein lies that the ones that come out of China were first examined by the Chinese Intellectual Property Office and they have a Middle Kingdom kind of approach. If it was not invented, if it was not discussed in China, it's new to them. They don't do a prior search around the world. They come in with quite a limited prior art, Chinese language prior art. Plop those cases in front of the United States Patent and Trademark Office and they fly through in 100 days, 200 days. Meanwhile, American drone companies are waiting two years or three years for the first office action.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Wow, that is, that is all new to me and a little horrifying.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: It it's truly unsettling to see these patents that come out with clearly militaristic activity. And what that does is it stops Americans from inventing in that space.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Well, I've just recently read Red Tsunami by Casey Fleming where he talks about a lot of other impacts that China is having in the American culture, in the American society, much unbeknownst to the average man walking the streets.
And now this is a whole new area.
So this is it really makes his title, Red Tsunami seem very appropriate. So that's very interesting.
Thanks so much for that. And this is just segment one, so if you're watching, stay tuned.
Dr. Julie Burke and I will be right back to talk a little bit more. Thank you very much.
We'll be right back with more conversations at the edge of technology and transformation. Stay tuned.
And we're back. I'm Todd Thomas, and this is Infinite Future on NOW Media tv. Let's look ahead.
As artificial intelligence transforms nearly every industry, it is also raising profound questions about creativity, ownership and innovation. I'm back with Dr. Julie Burke.
AI is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful innovation tools ever created.
But as machines increasingly assist in research, design and discovery, entirely new questions emerge about intellectual property and ownership.
Julie, how is artificial intelligence changing the way inventions are created?
[00:12:06] Speaker B: What a great question. I think artificial intelligence is changing just about everything for inventions. It's shifting us from the trial and error, one guy in a garage giving it a whack, building one device of some sort to a more predictive simulation.
In my area, biotech chem pharma, used to be you would be testing five drug compounds extensively to see which one of them might have the effect you're looking for. Take months and months and months. Lots of funding, lots of lots of lab rats. But no, an innovator now can use AI to screen 5 million variations looking for candidate compounds. We're not saying we found the real one yet, but really being able to select in what it might be. To me, this reminds me of the 1980s when I was up in Boston working at Biogen on molecular biology and immunology research.
We had A newly devised method, ELISA screen, where you could use plastic plates and screen thousands of compounds just together in a morning. It was all kind of automated. It was. And you could get results on big numbers. I feel like AI is doing that on steroids right now that we are able to look at very large numbers. And it hasn't replaced the human at all. But it's supercharged our processing power and it's given us what would take years for research into days. So we're able to gather a good deal of data and then we need really smart people to look at all that and try to figure out what it means.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: That's really interesting. That sounds very similar to the story we hear from software developers where you're not replacing your team, but you're dramatically uplifting their force. It's a force multiplier, if you will. Sounds like you're getting the same type of results in biotechnology where that same team can now run hundreds and thousands of simulations, opposed to tens or hundreds. So really ramping up that speed.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: That's exactly right, Todd.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: So what challenges does that and AI in general create for traditional patent frameworks?
[00:14:16] Speaker B: That question could not be too important these days in the world of intellectual property. I just came from the San Francisco annual meeting, American Intellectual Property Association. It's got, you know, your workshops and seminal speakers and your cocktail parties. I was up there for four days and all I heard about was AI and how AI is impacting and the risks. AI risks, AI concerns. It's really quite a challenge right now. This is for your traditional patent framework. It's a multi level question that you've asked. First off, we have the inventor and AI cannot be an inventor. But AI can assist, just like those ELIZA plates would assist the immunologist. Right. You've got assistants, you've got help there. But at what point do you draw the line between what the inventor is doing and what AI is contributing? The second thing we have is we have to go from there to a legal document, a patent application.
How do we verify when the inventor worked and when AI worked and that there's still a human invention in here? What date did this invention happen? That's very important in patent terms.
Back when I was working in the labs, we'd have our lab notebook every day. We'd write down what we do and we'd sign a date at the bottom. So should anything ever come back, we could say we were working on these aspects of this research project. On these days, this is what we're doing.
There's interest in Capturing the AI results. You ask it to design molecules that might be candidates for treating cancer, capturing the results.
But in the world of patents, we also need to capture the input. What did you ask AI to do? When did you ask it to do that? On what programs was that happening?
We all know you run the same search on AI2, three different times, you get different results.
Some patent attorneys are suggesting that once the application's been all put together, one which has had some AI assistance.
And these days AI is everywhere, assisting just about everything.
I heard a pretty smart idea. The attorney would sit down then right away and interview the inventors and say, we understand AI was involved in the creation of this application. Can you show us the queries that you ran? Can you show us how this works in real time? Video record the results that come out, have it be documented for the record. Because two or three years from now, when the patent examiner finally picks up the application, who's going to remember?
Also, AI will have changed so tremendously by then. If you try to reproduce the same work, you get different results.
For those reasons, it's this documenting. How do we capture in real time what has been done?
Then the next part about it is AI does not sign non disclosure agreements.
You give something to AI, it's like a vacuum cleaner and it can share it everywhere. It loves content. It's a great old content thief. You need guardrails on this and it's very hard to make those guardrails. Something that's often overworked, overlooked in the world of patents.
I mean, you can get your patent attorney, you could pay thousands of dollars, you could do it all through a formal, upfront, legit, boutique law firm process, which is what I fully would recommend anybody doing. Or you could go online and find file your patent application for $200. We'll use AI and we'll file your patent application.
My question there, where's the server? If the server's in India, you've just disclosed your invention outside of the United States of America.
You can't. You have to present it first to the patent office.
If that were to ever come out years from now in discovery, that it would be a killer, It'd be a total killer for your whole application. And you're probably not thinking that way at the beginning, but there's so many small mistakes, tempting mistakes that can be made that can really throw a ratchet in your patent portfolio.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: That's one of the conversations I think more companies need to have around corporate security.
What AI tools are your employees using throughout the business, because you're. You're exactly right. As soon as you feed something into AI, it's essentially in the public space. It's available everywhere.
So if you have, you know, sensitive information and potentially related to your intellectual property of your company, but your employees are using AI tools that are outside of the firewall, outside of your corporate security, you're essentially making that all public. So what I think you're saying is if an employee does that, and that happens every day all across the United States, you're really putting your ultimate patentability at risk. Is that correct?
[00:19:19] Speaker B: That is exactly it. You're giving your technology away, muddying any sort of legal framework upon which your patent can rest.
The other conversation I heard at last week at San Francisco is shadow AI. You touched upon it there. You can sit all your employees down, you can have the most rigorous procedures in place. You've got your guardrails. Everybody knows what they're doing.
But that temporary paralegal you hired last week, the clerk who really just doesn't wants to just get it done quickly and brings their own laptop to work, jumps on their own systems, and then jumps back in the patent office examiners, who are suffering with incredible overwork and bad it. It crashes all the time they're on production. It's called an intellectual sweatshop for a reason.
Patent examiners I could totally understand being tempted to take the. That confidential patent application, throwing onto their personal computer, doing their work there because the system's down, and then plunking it back in later. It's very scary how difficult it would be to actually regulate this and find this out. And when would it ever be found out? Years later in discovery.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: So how should policymakers be thinking about this issue and what are the potential solves?
[00:20:49] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh, that's a very good question.
What I'll pivot to again is China's been thinking about these issues.
China has a very strict policy already in place. If your patent application looks like it's been written by AI, they're marking them as irregular and denying them.
They're not accepting AI written patent applications. It's very interesting.
They went through retroactively back through issued patents and marked 15% of them as irregular.
We don't have that sort of rule here in America. And if you talk with patent examiners, they see patent applications are filed, all full of every AI ism you can think of. We've seen some studies where they've looked at newly filed patent applications. Maybe 15% of them are written by AI. You know we can find the EM Dash and we can find the weird words like tapestry, you know the things like that. The telltales are all there. And so yes, we're seeing it creep into the American patent system. It's very hard. We move much slower to reform and respond to technology than China has.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: So just for a patent application to be reviewed, you're saying it's taking two to three years.
So now we're talking about policymakers making changes to the policies around the patent office. I would imagine that those would take
[00:22:30] Speaker B: even longer, Much, much longer. And to be clear, the Patent office offers a fast track system. People with deep pockets, people who have more money can jump to the front of the line.
Your first time inventors and star startups can't, don't have that ability. So there is a two tier patent applications, a patent office right now for us.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Well that's kind of the, the American way, isn't it?
That's always been the case. Really? Not even American. That's always been the case. Deep pockets get things done.
Dr. Burke, this is fascinating.
Stay tuned, we'll be right back.
And we're back. I'm Todd Thomas and this is Infinite Future on NOW Media tv. Let's look ahead.
Welcome back. We're continuing our conversation with Dr. Julie Burke. And now we're going to turn our attention to a topic that affects every citizen, every business and every policymaker. Technological leadership.
Around the world, nations are investing heavily in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, energy systems and next generation infrastructure.
Innovation is no longer just an economic issue. Increasingly it has become a strategic issue that affects national security, competitiveness and long term prosperity.
Dr. Berg, you've written extensively about concerns surrounding the US patent system.
Why should Americans view innovation policy as a national priority?
[00:24:10] Speaker B: Yes, what a great question.
Innovation policy has always been a national policy. It's always been a priority for us. Let's roll the clock back 250 years. Now we've had a country where the right to own patents was the only right written in the Constitution. Our founding fathers knew having a state startup patent office was incredibly important for starting businesses in America. And what did that launch our early American industrial revolution. How did that come to be? Back then the Patent Office would issue patents without even an examination process and let folks fight it all out in court.
Inventions were going on in England. They were ahead of us in the mills and wheels and the fabric, the textile areas.
We sent spies over there to copy their designs and bring them back and start the mills. Up in Lowell, Samuel Slater and gave people Patents for things that they took from England. And it's not much different right now if we're looking at how we're the ones concerned about China taking from us and look how far we took our early inventions. It's been a fascinating story for me. I've been working with Scott Guthrie, publisher of Docent Press, and patent lawyer Michael Rich on a book coming out in September, Unfettered Invention, Early America and the Foundations of Our Patent System. And we're looking at those patents from 1790 to 1836 that started the industrial revolution. I believe from there we can really have a roadmap to what's going on today with our innovation policy.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: So how does intellectual property really influence a nation's ability to compete globally?
[00:26:09] Speaker B: Wow. 20 years ago there was 67 emerging technologies which would of course include biotech and genomics and AI and chips, semiconductors, the 67 critical technologies for our country. And we led in 60 of them 20 years ago.
And President Xi and China decided to make intellectual property a strategic, economic, very well thought out, top down priority for China.
He put in place encouragement, subsidies for people in China to get patents.
And right now, a entity in China comes to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and gets a patent. They get a subsidy from the government of about 7,500 pounds, which pays for all the patent filing costs and definitely encourages people to get patents. Our government's not doing that. We don't have any push for our people to innovate from the top down. In fact, there's been cuts in research funding, there's been at universities, there's been cutbacks, it's been harder and harder to get people to go into the sciences. And some of our sciences in the last couple years have been moving abroad, taking their innovative skills with them.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Well, not just the funding, but really just the timetable. If it takes two to three years to get your patent reviewed for an initial review, that's longer than the average life of a startup. A lot of startups will last a year or two and they'll either fail or they may get acquired. So if the patent just to get your patent reviewed is going to take two or three years, if you're a young startup founder, you may well think, why would I bother? I'll be onto my next company by then.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: That's exactly one of the problems we have going on here. As I mentioned in our last segment, you can pay money to jump the queue, but it's just really hard to envision moving forward. I'm in the biotech chem pharma space and the delays there are the worst in the Office. It's about 26 months to get a first office action on average for your pharma drug applications, your biotech, your medical diagnostics, all the things in your medicine cabinet. Meanwhile, we have Americans clamoring for lower drug prices and Congress being very concerned that these patents are evergreening, they're extending, extending their patent term. All of that might be happening, but who's looking at the Patent Office to say, can't we do this a different way? Can't we? We need to definitely improve conditions, hire more people? We definitely. The patent system is, is the backlog right now. That's a real, it really curtails people going into the patent system.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: It actually strikes me that that would be a system that is ripe for disruption.
If we think specifically about AgentIC AI and the incredible power that AgentIC AI has, an AI agent could review thousands of patent applications in a fraction of the time and could do it 24 7.
If you were to take a look at the Patent office workflow and redesign that from an agentic AI perspective, that could be a massive time reducer and could potentially get these patents reviewed in a timeframe that might work for young
[00:29:52] Speaker B: startups and that would be an awesome thing to be able to make happen. But what we're up against is an agency that it's self funded, it has the ability to charge certain amount of fees and that's where the money's coming from.
Under the Biden administration, the IRS.
They looked at the IRS and at the antiquated IT networks and Biden dumped $19 billion into the IRS over a period of time to build up and give the IRS a first class IT system. The Patent Office doesn't have that. Unless that money comes from Congress, from taxpayers, it'd be prohibitively expensive for the inventors themselves to pay the cost of doing this.
When the new administration came in, I was quite vocal about how if we are going to put AI layer that on top of the examiner's IT toolbox as it is, it's not going to work. They don't have any bandwidth that is down, it breaks. They don't have systems to even keep track of when they log in and log out. It's very interesting to note that the Patent Office is sometimes the last agency to adopt new technology.
This is not new to now. This was during the 1810s and 20s when we had printers.
There were printers back then, but the Patent Office insisted on hand copying ink on vellum.
Patent applications when the fire occurred in 1836, everything burned down. We lost 10,000 inventions. One reason we cop, they didn't keep a copy off site. They didn't put it in a fireproof safe. They didn't have a copy.
The Patent Office hand copied patents up till the Civil War.
I mean, it's just shocking. So we're in a whole new place here where this is a time of. That was a time of rapid technological advances.
Thomas Jefferson had a polygraph. Not a polygraph the way we think of them with, you know, the police officers, but a machine rectangle boxes, pens, where one pen is copying on one one sheet of parchment and the other pen is over there making a copy automatically. Thomas Jefferson called it the finest invention ever made and he wrote 20,000 letters in his life. And this is the only reason why we have copies of so many. But he didn't give that to the Patent Office to use. Even though he oversaw the Patent Office. He didn't give the examiners the best tools.
AI we. I don't know how we're going to be able to get them the best tools when any day of the week. You can go on patent examiners on Reddit and examiners are complaining. The search is down, the computers are down. And again, that tempts them to use their own private computers to get the work done. If we're right in a place where we don't have the infrastructure to support AI, let alone the policy changes and the push there and the funding for all this, these are the concerns I see.
[00:33:03] Speaker A: Oh, again, this is another huge light bulb for me. This has really been a informative conversation, so I really appreciate all of your insights here.
Sounds like the. Our Patent Office scenario is dire. So not only kind of the crisis you described at the beginning of our show, but also just the ability for the Patent Office to function in a low tech environment, which is ironic in and of itself. That's again, horrifying.
[00:33:38] Speaker B: It is very frustrating. There's been some pilots rolled out, to be clear. I strongly support the current director, John Squire.
He has come into the Patent Office and implemented some very strong measures to take some steps that are helpful to American inventors. But some of this is really hard to unwind. Government funding, you know, appropriations, where's the money come from? All of that is very difficult, especially in a short period of one administration. Right. The clock is ticking.
We call it. The clock is ticking. The pendulum is ticking. The pendulum is swinging.
[00:34:22] Speaker A: Those two things are certainly true. The pendulum is swinging, the clock is ticking, and the Countries that lead the next century will likely be those that best support innovation, entrepreneurship and technological advancement. We're going to take another break and when we return, we'll discuss the future of invention and the opportunities that lie ahead.
We'll be right back.
And we're back. I'm Todd Thomas and this is Infinite Future On Now Media TV. Let's look ahead.
As we conclude today's conversation with Dr. Burke, I want to focus on the future.
We are entering an era where artificial intelligence, biotechnology and advanced energy systems are converging to create possibly what once seemed unimaginable. The question is not whether innovation will accelerate. The question is whether our institutions, policies and leadership can keep pace. Julie, what emerging technologies excite you the most when you think about the next decade of innovation?
[00:35:31] Speaker B: My gosh, I'm big into natural resources. I would love to see AI Already it's being used. Where is the forest fire starting? Where is the first invasive species arriving?
Testing sewage treatment for early diseases. Early, early markers there. I believe that areas like that, it's ironic we're building these great big AI plants and all, but could that help us with our planet, with our environment, with our creatures following migratory birds, just figuring out where things are in that level. And also the biotech, biomed.
I see that incredibly interesting in the next decade things are going to be changing so fast. It'd be wonderful if America were in the lead of that process.
[00:36:23] Speaker A: Well, those are great ideas and it seems that AI is a good fit for that. AI is really good at taking over repetitive tasks. We talked earlier about software development and biotechnology development. That AI allows you to do 10x or 100x the same parallel processes, those same advantages and that same ability to do 10x or 100x would have the same benefit in identifying invasive species, identifying high fire risk overlapped with weather patterns. So it seems like those, the possibility of using AI for those purposes is absolutely there.
It probably comes down to like most things, funding. How do you fund that? How does someone make profit on that?
That's really seems to be what drives that type of development.
[00:37:15] Speaker B: I would certainly agree there. I would hope we had a federal government that wanted to support the policies of protecting the environment and it would be health, healthcare, looking for early cancer diagnosis. Wouldn't that be brilliant to just find cancer so early? We don't even need the hardcore chemo drugs. Right. Things like that would be fantastic.
[00:37:40] Speaker A: Well, and really the medical world has embraced AI much quicker than some other verticals.
AI image recognition in particular is used quite a bit for early diagnosis and in many cases, computer vision can diagnose or identify anomalies way sooner than the naked human eye can. So it's very possible and very powerful in the medical context.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: I totally agree there. That has been a fantastic breakthrough. It'd be just wonderful to develop more of that.
[00:38:17] Speaker A: Absolutely.
So how can innovators better navigate the increasingly complex intersection of technology policy and intellectual property?
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. We can't just be treating IP policy as like some sort of checklist for a legal department.
It's not happening. As you file your patent applications and check it off after the process product's been built, I think you really got to hard bake this into every step of every process.
It's a strategy from day one. And it's hard to imagine how to navigate this landscape. I mean, you've got to gosh, the regulatory shifts that will be happening, we don't even know of what those are. And who's sitting at the table right now in Congress trying to create the guardrails for this system that is so important right now. It's kind of scary because big tech has different drivers, different needs than the rest of us trying to innovate. And if big tech's running the show in dc, it's going to be very difficult for the new startups to come in that will be next generations big tech.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: So what advice would you give to entrepreneurs that are building transformative technologies today?
[00:39:42] Speaker B: Oh my gosh, please get a good patent attorney.
Absolutely. Invest money in patent protection.
Consider trade secrets. Don't home grow this yourself. I love over the years working with all the inventors and they're so resourceful and have that can do attitude and think if they just read a couple books and up and surely they can get their own patent on their own. And the heartbreak stories that come out of that, trying to fix the process later down the road, it's, it's really scary. If something's wrong with your patent and it comes out later in litigation, the costs are enormous. And I kind of liken it to, yeah, you've got a new business, you want to build a factory, you know, you're going to hire some people, you're going to get all this infrastructure, you're going to order some products, you'll get transportation. Transportation. You have a brand, you're gonna, you're gonna build this, this thing, right? You're gonna make this product.
You're eight years in and somebody comes along and says you don't have the deed to the land your stands on, you don't have a deed. It's, it's, you're gone, you're just sunk. And it's so hard to undo that and figure out how to undo that. But right now we've got predatory litigation going on and patents that are easily thrown out in court. And so it's very hard to know. And without that certainty that I have a piece of paper I can hold on to, that actually means something. It's a legal document, right? This means I have this invention.
Time and again I met with inventors who thought they had a patent on their product, only to have it be taken away. Plus you owe court fees.
Ouch.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: Now, what do you say to the young entrepreneurs and particularly in the tech world, we're hearing more and more, speed is the only differentiator. Speed is the only moat. You will be copied. People will do the same thing. They're going to repeat what you're building. The only way to win is to build the next thing faster to stay ahead of them.
How does, how does that fit into a patent process that's two to three years behind?
[00:41:56] Speaker B: So you can jump to the front of the queue.
You can also file international applications where you don't have the patent yet. It's all patent pending. It's going to sit there for three years before it gets picked up and then move into the lengthy U.S. examination process.
But the date is secure, your invention is secure and it's out there. It will be copied. Because on the whole, most of these patent applications are published at 18 months.
There is an opportunity. You can file a non publication request at least.
I saw your reaction there. It's this idea that your patent, everything in it is published at 18 months and you still haven't even heard word from the patent office. Whether you get an invention or not, there's strict time periods the patent office should adhere to. All first office actions should come at 14 months. So you could have four months to look at it and decide to abandon. So you don't want to throw your invention out in the world. But by delaying examination, it's kind of like they've locked you out of the house and are charging you rent to stand and cheer on the doorstep. Right? I mean, that's what we're facing right here. It's very cacophian in a way that this is a very difficult system to. So you wonder about trade secrets, don't you?
[00:43:21] Speaker A: So you mentioned a couple times paying a premium to jump to the front of the line. What is that premium and what's the Premium timeline.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: Okay. So they have track one applications that should be examined, start to finish in a year.
And typically the office has been honoring that and putting those track one cases up front. And it's about, about $4,000. I mean, it depends. If you're in your garage and you're trying to fund this yourself, that could be a deal breaker. But somebody else might think that's worthwhile. Typically you'll get a first office action about six months off of the track one. If you've got a crown jewel, brand new, amazing invention, we need to create a thicket around it. We need multiple patent applications. We need a savvy patent attorney telling you, you go in with this aspect and.
But now you file this other case that's going to come along and get this extra technology area. Then you file these others and file these others.
So we're into the $100,000 range already, right. With patent fees. It's a rich man's game. It's very expensive. It's very hard to think about that.
It's not the patent system our founding fathers envisioned,
[00:44:40] Speaker A: certainly. I think if you're a, a well funded startup, if you've got good investors, you know, VC money or private equity money, rolling in $4,000 to cut your timeline from potentially three years down to one year seems like a pretty cheap investment.
[00:44:58] Speaker B: Yes, I would agree with that. Anytime you can afford the jumping the queue, it's, it's always best for that.
[00:45:08] Speaker A: Okay, wow.
Fantastic.
One last question, Julie. When you look toward the future, what gives you the greatest optimism about human innovation?
[00:45:20] Speaker B: Oh my gosh, look how much we've done already. And look what we would never have imagined. And I can trot out the man on the moon or what not. I mean, we just go back through history and have a look at how much we've done. I feel very optimistic about the future. And you know, if I could end on any one note, I'd like to quote former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2018 at the Davis World Economic Forum. He said it. He said it right.
The pace of change has never been this fast.
Yeah. It will never be this slow again.
And people who champion change and can deal with a changing environment will do the best here.
We're moving forward rapidly. Hold on to your hat.
[00:46:16] Speaker A: Thanks so much, Julie. If people want to follow you, if people want to follow your work, where can they find you? Where can they see your work?
[00:46:22] Speaker B: I would love to hear from folks on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn under Julie Burke.
Maybe put the word patent. After that, you can pull me right on up. I try to put out information that would be relevant for innovation innovators, about the patent office, about the patent office policy and practice. And stay tuned. A book is coming out in September, Unfettered Inventions. This is our early American history and the beginning of the American Industrial Revolution. I love to announce that book, too.
[00:46:55] Speaker A: That's very exciting. I would love to read that book.
Thank you so much for coming on. This has been a really interesting conversation.
Hopefully we can have you back again soon.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: I'd be honored. Thank you so much.
[00:47:08] Speaker A: Thank you very much. You're watching Infinite Future. We'll see you next week.
