Eps 90 AI-Generated Content and Copyrights: Where Human Creativity and Technology Collide Transcript
Erin Austin: Hello, ladies. Welcome to this week's episode of the hourly to exit podcast. As you can tell, this is a new and exciting location for us. I'm very excited about today's guests as well as this conversation. I know it's going to be a great one for you. So welcome Nate. Thank you
Nate: Thank you so much.I'm excited to be here.
Erin Austin: Yeah, great. So we have Nate Hecker, who is the CEO of big idea with us. And so I'm going to let Nate tell you about his, um, company, but this is a topic that I know a lot of you have been interested in, you know, understanding how to inventory and protect your intellectual property, ways to license it and to monetize it.
And so we're going to cover all these things today. So Nate, can you introduce yourself and the audience to your company?
Nate: Absolutely. Like you said, I'm Nate Hecker. I am the CEO and co founder of Big Idea. The creator of the big idea platform. Uh, so big idea platform is a revolutionary new type of platform that will help, um, with IP management in the digital age.
Um, so we take a different type of approach. We use crypto ledgers, uh, and blockchain behind the scenes, uh, to enable IP into the digital age, into the intelligent age, uh, and try to, and try to, uh, hopefully shake up this industry a bit and, uh, be a driving force of good impact. Okay.
Erin Austin: So before you go any further, cause I know that crypto and blockchain is a big mystery for me, most of us.
So just give us the basics.
Nate: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, most people shy away when they hear blockchain. It's a very scary, disruptive technology. They immediately think of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. Uh, but we look at blockchain as a technology. Um, so there's a lot of good things blockchain can do as a utility.
Um, so one of those things, when we talk, I mean, when we talk about timestamping something. Or proving authenticity or even assigning ownership or attribution to something blockchain can act as a public notary almost. So there's some you can think about as a mutable database that is completely public.
And if you find creative ways to. You know, use that in your technology. You can really disrupt a lot of spaces. And we think IP is one of those spaces where it can be disrupted with.
Erin Austin: Well, how did you get here? Like, how did big idea come to be?
Nate: It's a bit of a journey. Um, it wasn't an aha moment all of a sudden.
It was, uh, it definitely came to us over the last few years. Uh, so my background is actually in healthcare tech. Healthcare technology. So I spent the last decade or so in that, in that world, really specializing in data interoperability as well as security, compliance and privacy. So this is a new space for me, I will say, you know, just being in it for the last two years.
But about two years ago, the company I was with was being acquired. Um, and so, as you know, with any type of acquisition, the future gets a little fuzzy. I've been
Erin Austin: there. Uh huh. So,
Nate: uh, it gave me the opportunity to pick my head up a bit and say, okay, what do I want to do next? Uh, and the obvious answer would be do something in your lane in healthcare.
But when I entered the space, it was, you know, doctors still wrote on notepads and uh, the medical, they still had medical record rooms, uh, which, you know, now fast forward, you know, 12 years later. None of that exists anymore. So it's a very mature, very standardized industry. And so we look to reenter that space.
We, we saw it as a challenge, right? It was not as much opportunity in that space to come in as a startup company. Um, and so my, uh, my good friend and I now my business partner and co founder, Jared Arnold, he, he and I sat down and just started going through different types of business ideas. We had. You know, 20, 30 different business ideas that we were working on and, and going through and doing market analysis and product fit.
And, uh, you know, we started realizing as we were doing all this research, uh, we had nowhere to put all this. And even though we thought we had some good ideas, like maybe it wasn't right for us, it could be right for someone else. And, you know, we were using Google sheets and Excel and notion to, uh, to track all of this, but.
There wasn't a platform for us to be able to like get feedback or collaborate on. Uh, and so we said, well, why don't we look at the idea management space, you know, and, uh, and so we started going down this, uh, this path of, uh, of saying, of seeing if, uh, sorry, pause, just collect my thoughts for a second. So we started going through the idea management, uh, place and seeing if this could be a viable product.
Uh, and one night. Um, we, I have this poster in my office that says, uh, ideas are worthless without execution and everyone loves to say that, right? Everyone says, you know, everyone's got a million dollar idea. Uh, ideas are worthless. Ideas are dime a dozen. You heard them all. So we, uh, we decided like, Challenges a bit.
Like, why is that the case? Because ideas aren't worthless. Every great new innovation that comes about starts with an idea. Every new product feature of a new service offering, it starts with someone having an idea and as you collaborate and as you iterate ideas, you know, they start to take shape. They start to take form.
When you go through, you know, you go through the different stages and get to strategy, get to planning, And we see this now as ideas have potential to have a lot of value, especially the more they get, uh, worked on.
Erin Austin: To their seeds, right? Yeah, to their seeds,
Nate: right? And so we, we went back and we really challenged this, okay, well, why are ideas worthless?
Well, the hard thing is, is once you say an idea to somebody, well, who owns that idea?
Erin Austin: Right.
Nate: And if you say it to a dozen people or 20 people, it loses more and more value because now everyone sort of knows that idea. Um, and that's where all of a sudden we were like, blockchain can fix this. So, blockchain has, we have the ability of taking an idea and once documented, we can timestamp.
We can then offer, we can then prove authenticity of that idea happened at this time and we can assign ownership and attribution to it. So we really started going down this and at the time we didn't realize we were actually in the IP space. So we were actually building a really good software for trade secrets and know how and copyrights.
Um, and so that's where we sort of came about and we started looking at the IP space and realizing, you know, um, After studying it for almost a year of being in it and really looking at what's currently available in this, in the space, it was established. It had software, but not a lot of new software. And, uh, it was very academia and it reminded me a lot of what healthcare looked like 10 years ago.
And so it got us really excited.
Erin Austin: You know, you use the term idea management. I've never heard that term before. Is that something?
Nate: Yeah, I mean, our original concept was, uh, I came from corporate my last few years of working and we would always use consultants for everything to validate. And uh, I know that working in smaller companies, great ideas come from your entry level employees, employees that are working on your product every day, dealing with customers.
But these ideas weren't getting up to senior leadership or they were getting lost in middle middle management. So we started off with this idea of management software and that's sort of where we started. But there is a lot of companies that do idea management. Not a lot of companies, you know, utilize it, but there are companies out there that do idea management, idea management.
Erin Austin: How did you know what you're working on was IP? Like, where, when did that connection get made in half?
Nate: That's a good question. I just knew that we really started looking at ideas. Um, Ideas are really trade secrets. Or they can be. And so that's sort of where we started. We really started the, we shift immediately to ideas into trade secrets, because we saw this as a space of not many people know what a trade secret is, let alone how to classify it, um, or protect it.
And I, my background being in security and privacy, I spent the last 10 years protecting PHI, uh, or sorry, personal health, personal health information. Um, and I realized like, I reflected on my career. We didn't spend a lot protecting our trade secrets, our know how. And we realized there was an opportunity here.
If we can teach people properly what a trade secret is, you know, how our software can help with it. Um, you know, really focus on the people process and technology piece and being a technology piece that helps streamline that process. There might be something here.
Erin Austin: And so, did you have a vision or a mission in mind when you first started, or was it just, okay, what, how can I use what I know in a way that's interesting to me?
You know, valuable to people.
Nate: I would say it was the latter. Mm-Hmm. , I would say we, we started just sort of navigating and, and constantly iterating. And as we iterated, we, we kept shifting. Mm-Hmm. and like any startup, like, we're still shifting today.
Erin Austin: Mm-Hmm. .
Nate: Um, as we learn this space and we learn new problems, we see how our, we, you know, we see our product can fit that.
And if we do a slight pivot, can it capture that market?
Erin Austin: Mm-Hmm. .
Nate: Uh, so yeah, it started with, it started with just this, the idea of love of being able to enable creators. And we realized that, you know, com, you know. A good lesson here, right, is companies don't create intellectual property. People do. But people aren't really empowered.
: And
Nate: so the whole thing was to say, with decentralized technology, can we give some of that power back to the creator? Would they be more willing to contribute ideas and IP to a company if the attribution was back to the person?
Erin Austin: Oh, how interesting. Yeah. So we, we looked
Nate: at it as like LinkedIn, right? Like LinkedIn is great at documenting your experience and your accolades and your, your credentials, but what about all the things you contribute to in a company over the course of, you know, however many years you're with them?
You can talk about through your experience, but there's really no software to prove that you contributed to this piece of IP. And so we saw it as a way of, you know, empowering the creators. And that's still one of our core missions is we're building for the creator, not necessarily for the company, the company owns and manages, but the people are the ones that you really want to get fired up and incentivize to create IP for you.
Erin Austin: Right. So do companies feel a conflict with that? They feel like, Oh, I will have extra responsibilities. When I acknowledge who my creators are versus it all going into the kitty.
Nate: Yeah, I don't believe so. I think, I think the industry, you know, in my experience has always been hard to incentivize people to document.
Um, and so there's this whole like knowledge management piece and, you know, we're just trying to take it a step further of classifying that knowledge, uh, and making sure that, you know, the institutional knowledge in someone's head when they walk away. Can really hurt a company.
: Yes.
Nate: So if you can incentivize them to take that institutional knowledge, those trade secrets and be able to, uh, incentivize them to document those and be able to pass that ownership directly onto the company and that can enable that company to protect that now and, or use that to educate the rest of their workforce.
We see it as a huge upside and a huge benefit for a company to want to use our, our software.
Erin Austin: So it's not just a way to document big ideas, so to speak, but also the nitty gritty. of running your business.
Nate: Absolutely. Yep. A full, a full, we're trying to build a full stack intellectual property management system that goes everything from documentation to protection to collaboration and then moves into you know, our real hope for the future is to enable IP in a new way and give people a new opportunity because that's the future.
IP is everywhere. Right. And it's really hard to be discovered. Most people aren't good at, at showcasing their IP and getting it out there. Yes. We think we can build a platform that will allow you to showcase and allow your IP to be discoverable. And then with new technologies coming with ai. mm-Hmm. , you know, augmented and virtual reality and metaverse, there's a ton of opportunity coming for how you can utilize your current IP in those new, in new ways.
Erin Austin: Yeah. Well you bring. to, you know, the audience that this, we have here, which are expertise based businesses, service providers, professional services providers, who have corporate clients, who aren't thinking, they're thinking about how do I build scale into my business, how do I build a business that has some independence from me, just, you know, selling my time.
And they know that it somehow involves creating assets and leveraging them, but they don't always call it IP or intellectual property. Um, I like that you talk about ideas because mostly they ask, you know, how do I protect my ideas? That's generally and, um, and it's very kind of overwhelming. And so when they think, you know, I'd like to say intellectual property is everywhere because, you know, every time we use our intellect, we're creating intellectual property.
But how are we, um, How do we help them understand it? How do we help them categorize it? Inventory it, protect it. And so how does big idea platform help?
Nate: Yeah, we actually have the same challenge. I remember the feedback I just received a little bit ago was like, you got to cut the word intellectual property out.
Like people don't connect necessarily with that word unless they're in the industry. Um, so, you know, We, what we call them are intellectual digital assets. Um, and I know that's not a better term than intellectual property, but moving it more to a tokenization or digitalization using blockchain, we allow someone to come in and register a creation, a piece of work that could be an idea that could be a, a copyright, a new material.
Uh, and then we wrap that into a container that we call an intellectual asset. Uh, so our platform at first, like. Just getting it documented and classified is huge. And so as you start registering your intellectual assets or your different pieces of IP, you start building out your, what we call your intellectual capital.
So that's like the first sort of stage, I think, of like really helping out, uh, companies is just to document and get to a place where your IP can start working for you. That's pretty cool. You know, once you have intellectual capital, if you're a company that's looking to grow, looking to get financing, looking to fundraise, you said it best, they're assets, right?
And so the more we can, uh, document and build your portfolio of assets, those can be leveraged in conversations when it comes to financing. And investors and financiers, like they love to know what's like, what's behind you, what's behind your company. Like, what am I truly investing in? And those assets are what make you unique.
So I think just starting with building your portfolio and giving a very simple, efficient and low cost tool to allow people to register. Now the whole blockchain piece, again, I know we've talked about it can be scary. We just put it in the background, right? So we make it super easy. We don't, we don't put any burden on the user.
We just use it in the background to, to be able to go back and audit and prove that this asset was created here by this person. So that's sort of like the first step, I think.
Erin Austin: Yeah, yeah. The language that we use, you use, I use, is so important. You know, funny that, you know, I probably left a little bit when you mentioned intellectual capital.
So, you know, I come from the corporate background. Everything is IT, you know. And then you have to, like, kind of modify how you talk about it.
Nate: When you figure it out, can you let me know? Because I think assets is the key. People, people relate to assets and that's why we try to just talk to talk about them.
These are just intellectual assets.
Erin Austin: Yeah.
Nate: Which was, I know, still a new concept, but hopefully people can grab a little bit more towards that.
Erin Austin: Yeah. Yeah. I was talking to my team earlier today and we were talking about, you know, one of the, um, audiences we like to talk to our business coaches who help experts like you.
Create scale like that's like, you know, and so, and I have been busy cataloging the, how business coaches talk about how they help their clients scale. And it's like this list that's growing of all the ways that they talk about scale without ever using the term intellectual property. I'm like, how, how is no, it's nowhere, you know, we go to, you know, they'll have one Oh, webinars, everything, and never once do they use the term intellectual property.
So I'm like, okay, I gotta figure out how to get in there. That's amazing.
Nate: No, it's so we're constantly trying to connect with, you know, we don't, we don't call our users users. We call them creators. We try to relate to them in a different way that everyone's a creator. And I think with new technology. With a gen AI and, um, all the new tools out there.
I think everyone at some, at some point is going to be a creator. Most people are already on social media. They're on Instagram. They're taking pictures or creating. They just don't know it. And so what they're really. Taking every time is they are creating that IP,
Erin Austin: right?
Nate: And so we're trying to connect with them as a level of really trying to empower the creator in you.
And then how does that work for your business?
Erin Austin: Well, how easy is it to use the platform?
Nate: I'm biased. I think it's really easy. Um, There is, I think, I think in the front, it's a, it's a, it's a little bit difficult getting started. We're working on trying to figure that piece out, but once you're in, it's really, really easy to use.
One of our main principles with building this was, um, to, to build a very usable, very, um, high end user experience, um, for our users. And, uh, the reason for that, not to get too technical, right? We heard of Web 2 and Web 3, sort of the shift we're moving into. If you ever dabbled into the blockchain Web 3 space, the user experience is horrible.
We really, in the last 10 years, have perfected that. The web two space, Instagram, Facebook, Google. Like it's very easy. Your parents are using it. Your grandparents are now using it. Like everyone's on, on, on the internet. And so we really did a lot of good the last 10 years. And then web three came along and sort of ruined a lot of that.
Just
Erin Austin: tell us web versus web three.
Nate: Yeah. So I'll give you my explanation of it. Hopefully that, that, that works. Um, so web web one was the ability to just be able to post out there. There's a thing about just Going to a company's website and seeing a billboard of what they're what they're selling web 2 was the ability interact We call that read and write so now you can like Instagram you can now post Wikipedia you can now you can post and you can build communities to you know, read the internet, but also write to it Web 3 gets into ownership So you've never been able to own anything before right when you post on Facebook you post them on Instagram.
They own that Yeah You can't pull that information back out. So web three is a new world where the individual creator. is now able to own the materials that are posting. Um, so it's a really cool place where we're going. Um, you know, trying to explain as easy as possible. So going back to that user experience, we try to bridge the gap.
We try to put all that Web 3 behind the scenes and make a really elegant user experience while giving them the, the UI they're used to clicking on nice big buttons, being able to write and document um, just like you would in Google. Um, so, you know, You know, like I said, the, the beginning is a little tough is because we do require every person or every creator to prove identity.
So one little step, one little hurdle we go through is, you know, the ability to take a picture of the front and the back of your ID. I have,
Erin Austin: I do have a, an account. I remember going through that. Yes. Yeah.
Nate: So that's like the one hurdle, but like that step's really important because now we're able to assign IP directly to an identity, not just you as a user, you as an identity.
And to me, that's really cool because, you know. There is, it's an immutable record now that this person, this human created this IP. And so we, there's a really important reason for it, but once you get over it, I think it's actually pretty, uh, pretty easy to use. And then we just got to massage how we talk about things, right?
Like, not necessarily calling things IP and figuring out a better usable word to represent that. Right.
Erin Austin: All right. We're pausing for a second. I can't remember if you said that building the connectivity with like the copyright officer that was On the record off the record. I'm sorry, Bill. You at some point you were planning to connect the platform to like the copyright office or the trademark office, or
Nate: I will.
I will say we integrated already with the United States PTO, but the copyright I would keep off just because it's a very difficult challenge. I'm happy to talk about the challenge, but we have integrated with the U. S. P. T. O. So I'm happy to talk about that.
Erin Austin: Okay. All right. Okay. All right. So one of the ways you helping people is like helping them actually reach the U.
S. P. T. O. USPTO. USPTO. Yep. Yeah. And so tell us about that.
Nate: Yeah. So we're not here to compete with the patent service that, you know, the United States offers and today and a traditional IP. And so as we talked about, right, we started as an idea management, we moved into trade secrets and copyrights and we realized that we can keep going.
We can capture all different types of IP. And so most recently, and our latest update coming out later this month, we've actually integrated directly into the United States patent and trademark office. Uh, so now you're like, well, I already have a patent or you have a trademark. So what, but now we're able to sort of ingest that into our platform and one represented as a, as a intellectual asset as part of your portfolio and allow you to manage it all in one place.
But the really cool stuff is what the comm. What we are going to be able to do with that once it's in our platform. So again, our main mission is to make IP enable IP, make it give it opportunity to thrive in the digital landscape. And so the very first thing is you need to register it. And once you register it, you know what we're building next, I think is going to be.
Pretty cool. And, uh, give, give users and creators new ways of creating, uh, revenue.
Erin Austin: Well, let's talk about what you're building. That's
Nate: yeah, I'm excited. We're, we're in the building stages right now. Um, and so everything we built today on our platform around portfolio management, collaboration, and we didn't really talk about marketplace, but we do have a marketplace feature.
All of this was sort of foundational for us to be able to get started on, to really build the next wave of how we're going to enable IP. And so our plans is, you know, if we, if we can take a digital asset or digital and intellectual assets, and then we can facilitate licensing agreements with other people and other parties, well, we can also facilitate artificial intelligent licensing agreements.
Very interesting. Right. And so once we have those different licensing agreements, we can actually partner with different AI engines. So as an example, chat GPT, um, is an AI engine, Dolly mid journey. We can partner with these types of companies and, um, we can actually take the licensing agreement as well as the intellectual asset and ingest it directly into the AI.
So they
Erin Austin: actually have a license to use it instead of just stealing it. Okay. Yes.
Nate: Well, I will say like, so a good, a good example, um, that I always use. If you right now go to chat GPT or go to Dolly, which is the image generator of chat GPT, and you type in. Draw me a picture of Taylor Swift holding a can of Coke.
It's not going to generate what you think it's going to. It's going to generate you probably a woman that's blonde, maybe country esque holding a red can without any labels. So right now, all the AI engines are actually really good at making sure they're not infringing on top of trademarks or likeness or other types of IP and So I, everyone looks at it.
I'm like, well, that's amazing. They can do that. And it is Mm-Hmm. . But think about how much it's limiting them. Mm-Hmm. right. To be able to use. And so if you're able to go out and license Taylor Swiss likeness for who knows how much money that costs nowadays, , um, and also be able to license out the trademark for Coke.
Well, you could go back, ingest those, those licensing agreements directly into an AI engine.
Erin Austin: Mm-Hmm.
Nate: and generate the exact image you were thinking about in your head. Mm-Hmm. . And the cool thing is. The terms and conditions of that licensing contract. Well, why aren't they just part of the prompt that goes in to make sure that AI Stays compliant with the terms of the contract And so I think we're entering a really cool world and uh, we have to first get a ton of ip You know into our system and and have it registered And then we really are looking forward to how we're going to enable creators for the future
Erin Austin: and so would you have a mass license like all the All the assets that we have People would opt in, opt out, like how would you
Nate: Yeah, I mean it's It's about, it's about just treating IP as a intellectual asset and then allowing you to get full control of the management of that asset.
So you have the ability to make that public, make that private. She kind of
Erin Austin: have toggles of what exactly it's a bunch of
Nate: configuration options. And again, we're trying to make it easy. Um, and again, we're not trying to compete with lawyers or agencies. We actually see this as a new way for agencies and lawyers to actually manage and come in and help manage these assets.
Okay. So, I don't know from your perspective as an attorney.
Erin Austin: Yeah, I mean, I think we all want licensing to be easier, right? I mean, so we have things like Creative Commons where you have, um, kind of standardized licensing that you don't need to negotiate an individual license for. And you have services like, is it the Copyright, Copyrights, CCCO, I can't believe I can't remember the name of it.
Yeah. So they have, you know, kind of just. They can license for you, you know, if you want something from the New York Times or from Harvard Business Journal or whatever. And so we want things like that. We want ideas to get spread around. We want people to be have an easy way to access. Our content because, you know, guess what?
They steal it if they can't figure out how to do it. And so, it's better for everybody to have an easy way, you know, that people can get access. So, um, yeah, I don't think lawyers are really that, uh, you know, it's the other, you know, it's the one on one stuff, right? That's still the, the, um, the stuff that you need.
Yeah. Presumably need lawyers for it. And
Nate: we're trying to build flexibility into our site. So we're, we're starting with standard agreements that people can just use off the shelf or give them the option to upload their own. Right. And then be able to make sure that the other party understands that this is not a standard contract, that this is something written.
You know, custom and you may just want to take an extra extra glance and have it reviewed by your attorney before entering it. So the licensing space is complicated. We're trying our best to simplify it. But, you know, start out, we'll just keep it very open to allow people to be able to use their own contracts that are more
Erin Austin: comfortable
Nate: with
Erin Austin: that.
Right. So, for instance, I have, I'm called the graphics queen. I love to kind of visualize different concepts. And so I had someone, Just last week asked me if she could use one of my graphics, um, with her materials and say, you know, I honestly just said yes. Yeah. And, um, but is that something where I could have uploaded that and she comes to me and say, Hey, I would like to use, you know, this content.
I send them over to big idea and.
Nate: Absolutely. That's such a great, uh, amazing example. Um, so yeah, if you would have wrapped that and created that as a intellectual asset, you could have just sent her a link. She could have registered, saw it, and maybe that image is like, Your eyes only and so we'll actually even you could protect it with a non disclosure agreement
: So you could actually
Nate: send them a link but before they could actually see the contents of it They're actually signing an NDA first and then you can enter into sort of negotiations And so depends on if you're selling it or you're licensing it You'll have the option of a one click button to be able to go and license that from you.
So we're hoping to be able to offer an express license like you talked about. Just a one easy click. Um, here's the terms and conditions of what you can use it for. And that person in our side has a choice to want to do it or not. Um, and then we execute that full contract right there. So there's no need to go outside our platform and just keeps it very efficient and very easy.
So yeah, that's a great example. Um, and then. We're also looking at like, you know, digital likeness and voice rights are a big theme coming up with, you know, AI and deep fakes. So why not be able to register your likeness and voice rights as an intellectual asset and do the same thing and just easily license that out or just consent, right?
The big thing is with that is you have to have the ability to consent. Then you have to have the ability to license, and then once you license it, right, monetize and tracking. So, there's just a lot of options we can go, and uh, we're just trying to, we're not trying to boil the ocean, but we're trying to stay broad that we can capture all types of IP, and figuring out, and really let it, let up to the users, for how they want to utilize this to fit their business or their model.
Right.
Erin Austin: Now you have many, many use cases, but I just thought of one, as you mentioned. I'm
Nate: all ears.
Erin Austin: Which is, um, due diligence room. Right. So, you know, people can just kind of everything in there and then buyer wants to look at it. They go in through there.
Nate: So we, um, Yeah. So collaboration, again, a big point, um, today, what we offer is the ability to invite someone into your intellectual asset.
Uh, so you can, you can add them as a collaborator, you can decide what role they have and you can facilitate it. They require an NDA before they're able to collaborate and see what's going on. And then the cool thing, again, going back to this blockchain technology behind the scenes, we are able to capture every edit that everyone's making.
And so you have this immutable log. Of being able to contribute together, um, on this asset. And every change, every revision is rehashed and posted back up on our, on our ledger. Um, And so we're, and we're able to sign attribution to each person's change or upload of documents. So we do see ourselves as a massive collaboration to what you are getting into and something that we'll be releasing in April is part of our workspaces, the ability to not only invite creators in, but businesses in now, and then we'll have the ability of creating data rooms.
Um, we data rooms are sometimes like a one way facing way. It's, it's great for like M and a events, or if you're, you know, negotiating a financing deal. Right. But so we have the ability of not only doing data rooms, but like these collaboration zones so you can add multiple intellectual assets into a room or documents into a room.
And again, it's completely tracked of who owns what and who's contributing what to really bring that transparency that collaboration needs. And transparency to me builds trust. Right. Obviously, I know you just recently talked about collaboration, uh, thinking about it. Yeah. Needing agreements.
: Right. And so like, we just want to
Nate: be able to be the technology that enables the compliance of that agreement.
Right. So we got lots of good stuff coming. Um, we, uh, we're very, very excited about that release and being able to start working with, uh, with businesses
Erin Austin: And so can today, someone can go to, is it big idea. com and it's,
Nate: it is big idea platform. com. Okay, great. But it is, it is available for individual users to sign up, to identify themselves and be able to start creating their first intellectual assets.
And if they want, they can go ahead and keep everything private and build their. Portfolio or their intellectual capital, or they can make it public and make it discoverable so that people can search and find it. And maybe it could, maybe there's multiple reasons why you may want to have your IP discoverable.
Erin Austin: Would Google find it or you had to be
Nate: right now? We're not indexing anything. Um, this is probably my, uh, my, my healthcare background around privacy. Uh, we, we don't index anything from these ideas. And so you have to be a validated user in order to be on our platform. And again, it's also comes down to auditing.
Right. So we want to see who's viewing different assets. And, uh, that's that. So in order to do that, we track, you know, who's able to do it, you know, do the different pieces. All right.
Erin Austin: And we're also reminded of the poor man's copyright. Remember that? Oh
Nate: yeah.
Erin Austin: So I guess if I have, uh, deposited something without registering at the copyright office, I can.
Prove when I, that I created it before somebody else created there.
Nate: Yes, exactly. It's very, it's, it's almost like it's an, uh, it's a very efficient poor man's copyrights, um, to be able to go in there and take a piece of work, classify it as a copyright, and then we will go ahead and do all the attribution, timestamping and authenticity for you.
So it's very, very efficient way. Now, copyright, obviously, once you create a piece of work, it is protected under copyright. But sometimes it's, it's hard to prove when you created it, or just gives you an extra level to be able to prove that out. Um, I will say the cool thing is I'm learning this. I'm not a lawyer by trade.
Um, but I'm learning, learning the space pretty quickly that if you created something, it's copyrighted. It may not give you the same rights as a registered copyright with the copyright office. But you can always register that at any time. So if you start seeing your copyrights being infringed, you can still go get it registered and offer that level of protection, that extra level of protection.
Erin Austin: And
Nate: then we can go and pull that, you know, eventually pull that copyright and show that this is a registered copyright to make sure that users know that there's an additional level of a registered copyright here.
Erin Austin: Now has blockchain or, been used as evidence In litigation yet, do you know?
Nate: It has in many niche use cases, um, to prove, um, mostly in the finance world around transactions.
Uh, but there's a ton of, uh, you know, there's, there's a lot of research out there that shows of how it can be used as basically a notary or a, um, You know, a public timestamp of events. And so it has been used in a lot of cases, and I think we're going to see a lot more of it happened going forward. I get back to IP just really hasn't been an industry that's really been tested with these new types of technology, even in AI, I think our laws and the industry is not ready for Gen AI.
: No, not at all. And we're seeing
Nate: that, we're seeing that, you know, the USPTO and copyright trying to figure it out quickly, um, and figure out where they, what side they want to be on. And so I think in the next few years, we're going to see a couple of cases being tried here and we're, we're obviously paying attention very closely.
Um, but yeah, there's been some niche cases that are there, but nothing, nothing substantial yet to really back behind.
Erin Austin: Okay. Well, speaking of the future, I mean, you created this book. Uh, this business. So many people start a business, you know, in order for the exit, the ultimate exit. How do you look at this business, your role in it, what your next step would be for you to exit?
Nate: That's a good question. Um, I don't fully know the answer yet, uh, but I know You know, I look at technology from an industry level, and I look at it from, you know, I think industries go through two different stages with technology. It goes through a consolidated stage, which I think where the IP has been, and then it goes through a disruptive stage.
And so I think we're, I think the IP space is primed for innovation. Disruption, um, just like healthcare was 10 years ago and has now gradually moved into the consolidate, consolidated stage. Uh, so I look at it from that perspective. And so I think we're just on the beginning of the disruptive stage in this, in this legal tech or IP tech type of world.
And so I'm really excited to ride this wave. And I think in the next five, seven years when we start moving to that consolidate stage again. Um, I think I will take a, we'll see where we're at and we'll take that position. Um, but I have learned one thing about myself. Um, I'm not made for corporate America, so I, I am sure regardless of where we are with big idea, I will be probably in a similar position.
I love being in the, you know, high growth, um, startups wearing multiple hats. Uh, and so that's, I know that's where I'll, I'll probably be in the next few years, regardless of, you know, where this goes.
Erin Austin: Um,
Nate: I'm just excited about all the opportunity out there.
Erin Austin: That is awesome. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for making the time to talk to our audience.
It's a. Something that they all ask about. So I know this is going to be very, very exciting for them. So once again, so it was big idea, platform. com. And if people want to connect with you, where can they find you?
Nate: Uh, you can email us directly at info at big idea, platform. com hop on our website at big idea, platform.
com. And through that website, you can find our contact information as well as be able to launch the app that will get you right into our platform.
Erin Austin: Awesome.
Nate: Yeah. Thank you so
Erin Austin: much. Well, thank you. Yeah,
Nate: that was amazing.