The Unpatent Manifesto

Technology drives progress. Innovators create abundance.

From year 0 to 1000, the world’s GDP increased by about thirty percent. From 2005 to 2015, it has increased by almost one hundred percent — and this trend is only accelerating. We’re living in a magical era that our ancestors could have only dreamed of.

In 1790, just one year after the Constitution was ratified, U.S. Congress passed The Patent Act as a framework to boost innovation. While it helped shape innovation, it hasn’t been able to evolve at the pace that our society has. The patent system has failed to evolve, and it’s failing us as innovators to move forward.

We believe in a world where companies focus on progressing society, not on using their intellectual property to sue others.

Entrepreneurs that start companies know this better than anyone. Your chance of failing is still the most possible outcome, no matter if you came up with the best idea. What really sets you apart is executing the idea the right way.

Sam Altman from YCombinator, possibly the best engine of building successful companies so far created, puts it succinctly:

“You can generally tell people what you’re working on without NDAs, and most patents never matter. The value, and the difficulty, comes from execution.”

Today, one of the world’s most innovative companies is Tesla. In 2014, its visionary CEO, Elon Musk, announced in a post called All Our Patents Belong To You that, from that point in time, all of the company’s patents would be free for everyone to use.

He described his rationale clearly: “receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit”, and gave his reasons for the decision:

“Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be a small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.”

We can see a couple of key facts described here, namely that patents are usually of little protection against a determined competitor. This means that execution always outperforms intellectual property.

The second is a practical reason, and is that being open about your technology makes it easy for a company to attract passionate and talented engineers. And people are the best resource a company can have.

We dream of a world in which intellectual property is free, and everyone is able to benefit from it.

Since it began, a lot of people were skeptical that the open source movement would impose over proprietary software. People thought keeping everything hidden and proprietary was the way they could differentiate.

This has been disproven time and time again. In reality, for every single proprietary software that you create, there will be someone who creates an open alternative.

The practical benefits of openness, such as anybody’s ability to improve the software, the possibility of significant brand exposure, the opportunity to attract great talent, and the possibility that your code ends up in places that you could never imagine, make it obvious why open source reigns supreme.

Furthermore, openness is not only about practicality or business, it can also have a much deeper, ideological side.

Back to Elon:

“We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.”

As an example of patents slowing down progress, 3D printers became mainstream not because of a technological breakthrough, but because a patent expired.

When you open your invention, the world benefits from it. Human evolution is not only biological anymore. We have expedited the process, creating advanced technology that simplifies our lives, and lets us create even more advanced technology.

So, as it wouldn’t be possible for anyone to patent the next biological change in the human body, it shouldn’t be possible for anyone to patent the next invention that will represent a great evolution of our species.

Back in the day, the Black Death wiped more than a half of Europe. Imagine if someone would have created a solution for it right after it started spreading. Now imagine that the solution was patented, and that during 20 years only the richest could buy it and live. That’s just not right. That’s happening now in a smaller scale.

In practice, as our evolution is technological now, having a monopoly on your new device or software is as ridiculous as having a monopoly on the future DNA of human beings.

We need to stop the enemies of innovation: patent trolls.

We live in a world full of hope. Children in underserved areas have, for the first time, have the chance to express themselves, to learn from others, and to do what makes us humans fulfilled: to create, to invent.

But all this hope goes down the drain when doing the most human act — inventing, involves running in the risk of infringing patents.

This is ironic because the goal of the patent system was to empower individuals to make their innovations public by granting them temporary monopolies for their works.

Unfortunately, the patent system is doing the opposite it was created for.

The patent system is also the home of the so called “patent trolls”, or non-practising entities. Their mission is to accumulate patents with the only purpose of extorting money to those pushing for innovation. They patent already invented things, and patent or buy obvious inventions so they can later threaten companies with a lawsuit.

And they have enormous success. Not even the company with the largest market cap in history, Apple, is free from their threats and extortion.

Patent trolls cost the American economy $29bn a year.

Patent trolls make small companies go bankrupt.

Patent trolls distract innovators from building.

Patent trolls threaten innovation.

Patent trolls must be eliminated.

They may have a few victories remaining. But in the long term, they are doomed.

That’s why we want to make innovation work for humanity, again.

Thanks to Daniele Levi and Michael Lisovetsky for their feedback and suggestions.