The patent application has since been rejected and abandoned, which means that for now the application is not being pursued as a patent. Even more good news: abandoned applications stay in the USPTO’s system, so it’s now prior art!

Good story, right?

In this case, I was incredibly lucky to have the support of a large institution (MIT) and even more lucky that we had a direct connection to ATAP through Joi to sort out the situation. I’m super grateful but realize that most other people in my position probably would not have had it so well. And I’m not sure what to tell them—unfortunately. Only that if one were trying to contact a large institution about patent issues, definitely do not go at it alone. Make sure to get a legal expert. Even in our navigating the patent issues with ATAP, we also always had the guidance of lawyers and legal experts.

What did I learn?

My biggest fear was that my fellow paper engineering friends and I would not be able to explore books and electronics further if these patents went through.

However, It turns out that at many large companies who have their own internal patent attorneys, it’s common for employees to get bonuses in the thousands of dollars for just sharing their work with the legal team or turning the disclosure into a patent application. There’s bigger bonuses if the patent issues.

I’ve learned that there are even lunch sessions at some big companies where people get to sit and chat with a patent lawyer to see if some patent could be drafted. If there’s a bonus attached, there’s even more incentive.

If students got the same bonuses for applying for patents, I can assure you there would be more patents coming from universities! What I mean is, it’s possible that sometimes people are less motivated by legal rights to a particular invention and more so by other incentives like getting financial bonuses, the validation and prestige of being a patent holder, or beefing up the patent statistics of a company for valuation purposes.

What about openly sharing work?

So in the end, unfortunately, I don’t have a perfect answer. Because on the one hand, sharing your work may lead to amazing collaborations with large companies that have the types of resources and expertise to get amazing, imagination-filled projects off the ground.

However, you may also run the risk of having work being patented away. In this case of electronic pop-up books, it appears that the people on the team have since stopped working on the project and the outside world wont know whatever became of it. The good news, though, is that since the patents never went through, the project itself is still open for exploration. Meaning anyone can still continue innovating on electronic pop-up books without worrying about these patents!

Personally, I like to err on the side of sharing more. At the end of the day, it was my research papers and the published work of others that stopped the patent applications in their tracks. While sharing stuff out means more people see them, it also means there’s more prior art to draw upon to keep an idea open.

More importantly, sharing work publicly keeps the project can alive and inspires others to continue developing!