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If you know anything about the Intellectual Property (IP) world, you know that it’s an absolute nightmare to navigate.
If you’re not familiar with it, let me walk you through some of what you’ll be dealing with.
Imagine that you came up with a great idea. In fact, this idea is so good, you’re strongly considering building a business around it and claiming ownership of the idea.
But before you can start thinking about your Shark Tank pitch, there’s a lot of homework you’ll need to do.
First, you’ve got to figure out if the idea is actually unique. More importantly, you need to determine whether or not you should be worried about protecting your idea.
There’s just one problem: professional searches can cost you as much as $3000 for a single search.
No, that wasn’t a typo. It’s actually that expensive.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the headaches of the current patent process.
There’s a major lack of transparency in the industry, with the average patent application being published roughly 18 months after the earliest possible priority date of the application.
Beyond that, the overall process can cost you in the realm of tens of thousands of dollars before everything is said and done.
As if that wasn’t enough, there’s absolutely no guarantee of commercial success in the marketplace if you manage to successfully patent your idea.
All of these issues beg the question: what if there was a way to streamline this process and make the IP discovery and patent application process easier?
Loci: The Crypto Solution To IP
Enter Loci, the platform for Intellectual Property discovery &Â mining.
The idea behind Loci was to revolutionize the invention process. Instead of having to work within an outdated system that’s bloated with red tape and pointless headaches, Loci decided to offer inventors a different choice.
The goal was to give inventors the ability to discover and mine IP on the blockchain, using Loci’s InnVenn platform as the marketplace for the buying and selling of IP assets. That’s right, Loci created a platform where inventors could take advantage of an easy-to-use contextual based search tool to understand more about their potential IP.
InnVenn itself is actually pretty impressive, offering users a live data feed with instant results. It does this by combining 4 different kinds of searches into one, and taking advantage of a compounded multi-layer searching approach.
But to really understand how Loci could change the IP world, we first need to understand what they stand for and who they’re hoping to serve.
Loci is, for all intents and purposes, a platform designed for one thing: changing the way the world invents and values ideas. Their goal? To democratize the invention process as we know it and set a new standard for empowering innovators and promoting the effective crowdsourcing of R&D.
The global invention process, whether you like to admit it or not, is fundamentally flawed in its current state. Ineffective global IP laws have created an unreasonably chaotic and messy innovation ecosystem.
More specifically, the patent process itself severely limits inventors by charging them ridiculous legal expenses, taking an average of 3–5 years to fully process, and a concerning level of limited transparency.
And most concerning of all is that despite all of that effort and struggling, 97% of patents make absolutely no money.
The second facet of Loci is where things get really interesting for the cryptomarket.
Loci offers native LOCIcoin tokens as a fundamental asset of the Loci ecosystem, and it’s easy to see why.
With LOCIcoin, you can stake your claim of an invention on the Ethereum blockchain. Beyond that, you can place bids to either or own or license IP. You’ll also have full featured access to the InnVenn platform. And if that wasn’t enough, you’ll be able to use them as an exchange medium for both buying and selling IP.
LOCIcoin can be used to reward platform users and as a consistent international valuation metric for IP.
As for who Loci is for, it’s essentially a multi-sided platform that can benefit anyone who needs to understand more about the landscape of innovation. That includes IP attorneys, patent researchers and patent offices.
Obviously, the inventors themselves will benefit massively from this platform, since they’ll be able to both protect their ideas more easily and move much more quickly when it comes to actually patenting them.
Beyond that, both investors and corporations will be able to save massive amounts of money on research simply by relying on Lico’s search tool when creating new products and technologies.
The IP world is long overdue for an upgrade, and Loci, along with their InnVenn search engine platform, are here to make sure that the future of IP is safe in the hands of the cryptomarket.
Disclosure:
The author has had a working or personal relationship with one or more companies mentioned in this article in the past. Access to mentioned company’s management and information was made through the author’s personal network. All information was vetted prior to posting.
Disclaimer:
This essay is not intended to be a source of investment, financial, technical, tax, or legal advice. All of this content is for informational purposes only.
Could Crypto Change The Future Of IP? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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