Mauritz Kop Presents Quantum: Waive or Pledge IP at IPSC 2021, Cardozo Law School

By AIRecht Editor

New York, August 4, 2021. Quantum technology reached the IP scholars' main stage in 2021. At IPSC 2021, hosted online by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, Mauritz Kop presented Quantum: Waive or Pledge IP on August 4, 2021 — workshopping the intellectual-property architecture of his quantum research line before the field's assembled scholars. The published form of that argument is analyzed in Quantum Computing and Intellectual Property Law.

The Intellectual Property Scholars Conference — co-sponsored by Berkeley Law, Cardozo Law, DePaul Law and Stanford Law School's Program in Law, Science & Technology — is the works-in-progress forum of the IP academy: short presentations, dense Q&A, no published proceedings, everything aimed at making drafts better. The 2021 edition ran online on August 4–5 and 11–12, with Cardozo's Intellectual Property & Information Law Program as host.

Waive or pledge intellectual property in quantum technology — the question at the heart of the IPSC 2021 talk.

The question: waive or pledge?

The title compresses a real policy dilemma. Quantum computing is arriving as a foundational technology built overwhelmingly on decades of publicly funded research — yet its patent landscape is consolidating fast, raising the prospect that a handful of portfolio holders could gate access to the field's basic building blocks. If society wants broad, safe access to quantum infrastructure, two instruments present themselves: waiving exclusive rights for defined categories of foundational quantum inventions, or pledging them — keeping the patents but committing, FRAND-style or open-source-style, not to assert them against qualifying users.

The argument Kop put to the IPSC room develops both options and their hybrids: quantum-specific patent pledges, compulsory licensing where concentration hardens, shorter sui generis protection terms calibrated to quantum innovation cycles, and antitrust as the backstop where voluntary instruments fail. The physics sharpens the legal question: the no-cloning theorem forbids making a perfect copy of an arbitrary unknown quantum state — friction at the foundations for IP regimes traditionally predicated on the act of duplication. Doctrine built for copyable subject matter meets a technology whose core quantum states cannot, even in principle, be copied — while the classical control hardware and software around them remain ordinary, copyable subject matter, which is exactly why the IP analysis must work layer by layer.

Why pledges are more than a gesture

Patent pledges have a track record outside quantum technology: standards bodies run on FRAND commitments, and technology companies have publicly pledged portfolios to protect open ecosystems — instruments courts and competitors learn to rely on. The quantum question is whether such voluntary architecture can carry a foundational technology's access problem, or whether defined statutory waivers must do the heavy lifting where private incentives point the other way. The stakes of that choice are practical: a pledge regime preserves the patent system's investment signal while lowering the litigation risk for researchers building on pledged technology, but it depends on drafting — scope, duration, defensive-termination clauses — that courts have only begun to test; a statutory waiver removes the uncertainty but also removes the incentive, which is why the presentation reserved it for layers where public funding, not private capital, did the inventing. The presentation's answer was institutional rather than ideological: match the instrument to the layer — pledge where the ecosystem polices itself, waive where concentration would otherwise gate basic science, and keep compulsory licensing in reserve as the credible threat that makes the voluntary instruments honest.

From IPSC critique to the Berkeley Technology Law Journal

The workshopped draft matured into Quantum Computing and Intellectual Property Law, published in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal — available from the journal at btlj.org, with the permanent archival copy in the Stanford Law Library's collection at purl.stanford.edu/vg705th5067. The article maps how patents, trade secrets and copyright apply to quantum hardware, algorithms and software, and where bespoke instruments — including the waiver and pledge mechanisms presented at Cardozo — serve innovation better than one-size-fits-all exclusivity.

The IPSC critique mattered for exactly the reasons the format promises. A waive-or-pledge proposal sits at the junction of patent doctrine, innovation economics and competition policy; an audience of IP scholars probes each joint — does a waiver dull the investment incentive the patent system exists to protect, can pledges bind successors-in-interest, and who defines the "foundational" category? Those are workshop questions, and the published article is stronger for having faced them.

Cardozo's IP program as host

The hosting rotation is part of what keeps IPSC honest: Berkeley, Stanford, DePaul and Cardozo each bring their own center of gravity, and Cardozo's Intellectual Property & Information Law Program tilts the room toward information-law questions — data, platforms, speech — that read a quantum IP paper differently than a patent-heavy audience would. For an argument about waiving and pledging exclusive rights in a foundational technology, that mix of patent scholars and information-law scholars is a feature: the proposal has to satisfy both the incentive logic of the first group and the access logic of the second.

The wider responsible-quantum arc

The Cardozo presentation was one station in a research line that treats quantum technology as a governance challenge before it becomes a governance crisis: from Regulating Transformative Technology in the Quantum Age, which framed the innovation-policy stakes, to the distributive-justice analysis discussed in Abundance & Equality. Across that arc the IP question keeps returning, because access to quantum technology — who gets it, when, and on what terms — is decided in significant part by how its intellectual property is held and exercised.

The same summer the waive-or-pledge argument reached Cardozo, its normative frame was being worked out in parallel: the proposal for a legal-ethical framework for quantum technology, which situates IP instruments inside a broader set of principles for responsible quantum innovation. Read together, the two pieces answer each other — the framework says what quantum governance should protect, and the waive-or-pledge analysis supplies one of the concrete legal mechanisms for protecting it. That division of labor, principles in one paper and instruments in another, is characteristic of how the research line was built: no single article carries the whole argument, but each is engineered to slot into the others.

Why this presentation matters

Timing is the point. Artificial intelligence (AI) had taught the legal academy what it costs to regulate a foundational technology only after its market structure has hardened; in August 2021, quantum computing and quantum technology were still mostly a physics story in that same academy; presenting a worked-out IP architecture for the field at IPSC put the waive-or-pledge question on the scholarly agenda while the patent landscape was still forming — when policy can still shape outcomes rather than litigate them afterward. That is what works-in-progress scholarship is for: arriving early, in public, with an argument sturdy enough to be attacked.

Last updated: June 9, 2026