IPSC 2021 at Cardozo: on August 4, 2021, Mauritz Kop presented Quantum: Waive or Pledge IP at the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference, hosted online by Cardozo Law School — putting the intellectual-property architecture of quantum technology before the IP academy while the field's patent landscape was still forming.
A real policy dilemma in three words
Waive or pledge: if quantum computing's basic building blocks rest on decades of publicly funded research, should foundational exclusive rights be waived for defined categories — or kept but pledged, FRAND-style, against assertion? The presentation developed both instruments and their hybrids, from quantum-specific patent pledges to compulsory licensing and shorter, innovation-cycle-calibrated protection terms — an IP architecture for a technology whose patent landscape was consolidating faster than its governance.
Physics that unsettles doctrine
The no-cloning theorem forbids perfectly copying an arbitrary unknown quantum state — friction at the foundations for IP regimes predicated on the act of duplication. A law built around copying meets quantum states that cannot, even in principle, be copied; the legal-ethical groundwork for that collision is laid in Establishing a Legal-Ethical Framework for Quantum Technology.
From workshop draft to Berkeley Technology Law Journal
The critiqued draft matured into the Berkeley Technology Law Journal article mapping patents, trade secrets and copyright onto quantum hardware, algorithms and software — and arguing where bespoke instruments serve innovation better than one-size-fits-all exclusivity. The IPSC room's questions — incentives, successor liability, category definition — made the published version sturdier. That is what the works-in-progress format is for: short presentations, dense Q&A, no proceedings, everything in service of the draft.
Patent scholars meet information-law scholars
Cardozo's host program tilts the IPSC room toward information-law questions — data, platforms, access — so a waive-or-pledge proposal had to satisfy both the incentive logic of the patent scholars and the access logic of the information-law side. A proposal that survives both audiences is closer to policy-ready than one bred in either camp alone.
Arriving early, on purpose
In August 2021 quantum technology was still mostly a physics story in the legal academy. Presenting a worked-out IP architecture then put waive-or-pledge on the scholarly agenda while policy could still shape the landscape rather than litigate it afterward. The instrument-matching logic — pledge where the ecosystem polices itself, waive where concentration would gate basic science, keep compulsory licensing in reserve as the credible threat that keeps the voluntary instruments honest — has only gained relevance as the quantum patent landscape has consolidated since.
Meer lezen