John Wise, CEO and founder of Loci, a company seeking to simplify the patent search and invention process, recently presented at World Blockchain Forum London.  Loci is one of the only companies going into their token sale with a market ready product, InnVenn.

Coming from a background in automotive engineering, John Wise CEO saw the issues with the current patent process firsthand and decided to start Loci to tackle some of the endemic problems with the patenting process.  The tagline in Loci’s whitepaper reads: “Loci’s mission is to change the way we all innovate and the value of ideas as a whole.”

On their DIY patent research platform, the interface provides a set of Venn diagram representations of prior inventions displayed as dots to help discover ‘whitespace’ between them, allowing inventors to find fertile ground for ideas and speed up their research process.

The patent industry of tradition has existed in numerous forms, sometimes for the benefit of inventors, other times to enforce monopoly. However to this day, getting an idea protected has never been more lucrative and necessary in the face of the radical openness the internet has provided to both Patent Licensees to Patent Infringers.

But along with this radical openness came patent trolls, corporate patent wars and a long backlog for the US Patent Office. The number of applications for patents in all categories have skyrocketed; putting United States Patent and Trademark Office workers in positions of having to check 10,000 pages of material per day. For most young companies, up to seven years waiting for confirmation and spending tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees for a patent to be accepted isn’t worth the hassle or the capital.  From their whitepaper:

“The global invention process is fundamentally flawed, creating an unnecessarily chaotic and risky innovation landscape characterized by wasteful research and development spending. This process, convoluted and fraught with expense, inherently stifles progress. Legally protecting an idea is essential, but the patent process is difficult and expensive, and many inventors are forced to go straight to market or never follow through their invention.”

In this sphere, Loci is not alone; going up against movements like Open source, Creative Commons Licencing and others who are attempting to shake up the monolithic patenting infrastructure. However Loci’s use of a distributed immutable database – one of the primary use cases for blockchain tech – allows both the inventor and corporations to reap the benefits of new business models and legal arrangements.

The way Loci seeks to implement this is by recording search results, the time stamp, unique user id, and relevant ‘prior art’ to the blockchain. All of which is crucial for transparency and the legally defensible right of ownership of an idea.  This immutable public disclosure takes advantage of current patent law; granting the inventor a 12-month amnesty period in which they have exclusive rights to patent or sell their idea.

They can either sell on their own or as part of an ‘investment pool’ to corporations and investment banks looking to build an IP portfolio. The main aim behind this is to short circuit the patent process by providing a source of inventive ideas for those most capable of developing these inventions, whilst rewarding inventors for the work and creativity all within the LOCIcoin ecosystem.

Using a novel, ‘ecosystem-by-design’ approach to their tokenomics; their investment pools will be purchasable on the platform using only LOCIcoin bought from a publicly traded pool. However, instead of burning these coins, they get recycled and “rain back down to the inventors” on a weighted basis relative to how many inventions they have hosted on the platform. Also in the event of a network gridlock, John is holding himself legally liable with fiduciary responsibility to release some of the tokens held back for Loci to stimulate the market.

However, Loci has recently announced a delay to the token sale to implement new technology and with few public details about the legal basis for the system, the team still has a lot to prove; the $249/month price tag may currently be out of reach for some sole-traders and young start-ups to fully engage without legal ratification. That being said, $3000/year to access patent research and application services still pales in comparison to the tens of thousands currently necessary to get a patent today and this will be a welcome change of pace for a tiring industry steeped in tradition, precedent and prestige.

Loci’s token sale is slated for December 2017.

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