Slaying AI Patent Trolls (or at least making their lives miserable)
How my 2002 patent filing protects VSTRAT and everyone else building expert systems for professionals.
When people in tech talk about “giving back to the community,” they usually mean open source code. GitHub contributions. Pull requests. The green graph as proof of virtue.
My contribution lives on a different platform: the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
May 24, 2002
That’s when I filed USPTO Application 20030219709: “System and method for educating, managing, and evaluating clients of professionals.”
It describes business rule engines (what we called AI then) that generate personalized professional guidance. Dynamic content based on client profiles. Feedback loops. Multi-channel delivery. The architecture underlying what’s now marketed as “AI-powered personalization” for professional services.
Then I walked away. Never prosecuted it. On purpose.
The checkmate
Here’s what that filing did: it created published prior art that sits there forever, maximally broad, never narrowed by a patent examiner.
If your patent is older than mine, it’s expired. If it’s newer, my application is prior art.
Patent trolls exploit timing filing something broad, waiting for others to build value, then shaking them down. My 2002 publication closes that window. I’m not a patent litigator and I’m not making legal claims about specific patents, but the timeline and public disclosure published as prior art creates obvious questions if a patent didn’t cite it. Ask your own attorney what that means.
The philosophy
Most “open patent” strategies: get the patent, then generously license it. You still hold exclusive rights; you’re just being benevolent.
I skipped that step. Never let myself have the rights in the first place.
Not generosity after acquisition. Generosity instead of acquisition. Similar to open source.
Every professional-engagement platform, legal-intake system, automated coaching tool, and professional-client workflow built since 2002 has operated in space I worked to keep open.
The invisible contribution
Defensive contributions are invisible when they succeed. Nobody got sued, so nobody knows they were protected. There’s no GitHub graph for keeping a field unpatentable.
But the receipts exist.
VSTRAT.ai began as an independent project, moved to INSEAD where it was built out as a research project, and is now, again, a private company. That 2002 filing protects us all from patent trolls. Ideas themselves aren’t protectable (a common myth is they’re copyrightable; an incorrect and frankly ridiculous idea itself). But novel implementations of ideas can be patented if they’re not already prior art. Thanks to that filing, patenting expert systems for professionals should be substantially harder.
- Michael