Ant Group freely opens 43 patents, and Internet innovation counters "involution".
Ant Group recently released a somewhat puzzling data -
The Ant 2024 Technology Ecosystem White Paper shows that so far, Ant has freely opened 43 of its technical patents and patent applications, mainly in the fields of security technology, accessibility, and carbon neutrality.
Patents, as an intangible asset and technical asset, are an important means to enhance the competitiveness of enterprises. After applying for patents, Ant "opens them for free". Why is that?
Regarding these 43 technical patents and patent applications, Ant says that any individual, enterprise, or institution in the world can freely use these technical patents opened by Ant to identify and prevent fraud, protect user privacy and security; reduce the energy consumption and carbon emissions of the high-tech industry, and lower the threshold for elderly people, visually impaired people and other user groups to use smartphones.
In fact, "patent opening" is not a new thing in the technology industry. In the 1990s, the United States began to try to promote technological innovation and industrial development through open licensing.
Looking back at the vitality of Silicon Valley in technological innovation, patent opening can be regarded as a small piece of the puzzle that constitutes its prosperous panorama.
The United States has a strict intellectual property protection system, but patent disputes such as those between Google and Apple also show that overly high patent walls can become offensive and defensive weapons among technology giants. Patent protection is the "driving force" for innovation, while excessive patent protection is likely to become a shackle for technology dissemination and market development.
Musk's attitude towards patent opening particularly reflects this kind of speculation.
In past interviews, Musk once stated, "We don't really have patents. Patents are for the weak. Patents are often used to block technology. They are like using landmines in a war, so they don't actually help move things forward."
In 2014, Musk announced that he would freely open the electric vehicle technology patents. By the end of 2023, Tesla has publicly disclosed a total of 361 patents, covering technologies such as batteries, motors, electronic control, vehicle manufacturing, human-computer interaction, and charging piles.
To a certain extent, Tesla's open attitude as a pioneer has promoted industry standardization and cost reduction. More importantly, it has attracted more people to participate in the team of making the new energy vehicle industry "cake" larger, directly turning rivals into a part of its own chain.
The lesson left by Tesla's story is that compared to the "lone wolf" development model, sometimes "grouping together" can produce a greater synergy effect.
01. Behind Ant, the Industry Moves Collectively
Similarly, taking "patent opening" as a window, it can be observed that Chinese Internet enterprises have been responding to such market trends for a long time. As early as 2015, Baidu announced that more than 100 basic patents in the field of intelligent voice would be freely open to alliance members for use.
There is another case that is quite similar to Tesla. In September 2024, Huawei announced that it would fully open the intellectual property rights related to Hongmeng and Euler to the industry.
In this regard, Fan Zhiyong, the head of Huawei's Intellectual Property Department, stated, "The relevant intellectual property rights are fully open to the industry. Through opening up in exchange for protection, and enabling thousands of industries, Huawei can ultimately benefit from the industrial development." "Friends in the industry can learn from it and gain inspiration, but if they want to use it, they need to obtain our permission."
Over the years, the patent opening and patent alliances of Chinese Internet enterprises have formed a certain climate. And with the intensification of global technological competition, this consensus is becoming clearer: In the competitive and cooperative relationship, the balance should continue to tilt towards the cooperative end.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the business landscape in an unprecedented way, and the "island" model of Internet enterprises in the past is likely to be broken. A move by Alibaba in 2023 proves this point from the side.
At that time, Alibaba's DAMO Academy freely opened 100 AI patent licenses to the society. This is a large-scale AI patent opening action. The open patents cover multiple AI technical fields such as image technology, video technology, and 3D vision, including 3 core medical AI patents for precise cancer treatment.
In addition, the breakthrough progress of generative AI has greatly advanced the arrival of the era of deep intelligence, and the importance of security technology is becoming more and more obvious. Artificial intelligence and security technology are regarded by the industry as the two future general technologies in parallel.
The "Value Report of Security Technology in the Digital Era" released by the Digital China Research Institute of the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in early 2024 points out that in the future, security technology will become a "public good" of the society and a key guarantee for technology for good. Making investments in it as early as possible will help seize the initiative in the development of emerging technologies and industrial iterations.
Referring to the experience of Silicon Valley and other places, large enterprises reduce the intellectual property barriers for relevant enterprises to enter the industry through patent open licensing or free patent opening, encourage more enterprises to form a consensus on the technical route, and create a more favorable external environment for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements to achieve the purposes of cultivating an innovative ecosystem and emerging markets.
According to the "Brief Patent Analysis Report on Key Technologies for AI Security and Trustworthiness" released by the globally authoritative third-party intellectual property agency IPRdaily, Ant Group currently holds the largest number of "patents for key technologies of AI security and trustworthiness" worldwide. This is the second consecutive year that Ant Group has ranked first on the list, followed by Huawei and Tencent.
These enterprises are currently relatively active in reducing barriers. The Ant 2024 Technology Ecosystem White Paper mentioned earlier shows that among the international and national standards that Ant Group has cumulatively initiated, the largest number is also in security technology.
Among the 43 technical patents and patent applications freely opened by Ant, 15 are concentrated in the field of security technology, and many are related to the security of users' "money bags".
For example, a method and device for processing transfer transactions, with the application number CN201811095903.7. Based on this technical patent that can set a delayed arrival time, Alipay has set a "15-minute cooling-off period" and a 24-hour delayed arrival function for users, reserving a "regret pill" for you.
Another intelligent interaction security deployment method and system, with the application number CN202210698196.0. This technical patent that generates a user's virtual identification number has been applied to Alipay's "Wake-up Hotline". When fraud risks are identified, Alipay will prevent the transaction and also contact the user through the hotline to prevent the user from continuing to transfer in another way.
There is also a method for obtaining the transaction identity information of the fraudster, with the application number CN201911109249.5. This public patent uses an intelligent chat plugin to "chat up" with the scammer and obtain the scammer's personal information in the chat, using magic to defeat magic.
Image source: IC photo
From a technical perspective, the technology industry promotes patent opening, perhaps to reduce "involution" and "internal friction". Internet enterprises such as Baidu, Huawei, Alibaba, and Ant have already thrown out the olive branch.
Horizontally, what needs to be considered is that as Internet enterprises reach more and more comprehensive user groups and scale coverage, how can patent opening play a more social role to enable smaller enterprises and more insignificant individuals to truly benefit.
02. Technology with Temperature Brings Inclusiveness
On the website of the National Intellectual Property Administration, such a story is shared.
A small and medium-sized enterprise in Dalian that is committed to developing industrial robot automation technology and its equipment found in the local trading center that the open licensing patent "An Improved Smith Prediction Control Method Based on CRNs" of Dalian University is very in line with the technical needs of the enterprise.
Through patent cooperation with universities, this patent has been applied to the company's industrial robots and fully automatic cleaning equipment, greatly improving the system performance of the equipment. The general manager of the company said that in just half a year, this patent has created an economic value of nearly 10 million yuan.
A glimpse of the whole picture. Since 2019, China's international patent applications have ranked first in the world for four consecutive years. Technology enterprises are not only the main force in patent reserves, but also the vanguard in practicing patent open licensing.
Patent open licensing means that the patentee voluntarily submits a patent open licensing statement, clearly marks the patent licensing fee, and the administrative department for patent under the State Council "widely publicizes" it to the whole society. Any unit or individual can obtain an implementation license by notifying the patentee in writing and paying the marked fee, and all licensees are treated equally.
As of the end of June 2023, more than 1,500 patentees in 22 provinces have participated in the pilot, and 35,000 patent pilot open licenses with market prospects and easy to promote and implement have been selected and matched and pushed to 76,000 small and medium-sized enterprises, reaching nearly 8,000 licenses.
They are all undertaking social responsibilities. Affected by the characteristics of enterprises, the hard technology industry has an obvious dependence on the "integration of industry, academia, and research" path in patent opening, while the choice of methods in the Internet industry is more concentrated on keywords such as technical temperature, free opening, and alliance cooperation.
In November 2021, under the guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Alibaba, Ant Group, Kuaishou, Ele.me, Tencent, Bilibili, and 360 jointly initiated the establishment of the "Information Accessibility Technology and Intellectual Property Open Working Group", announcing that it will freely open information accessibility technology patents to the society, with the first batch of 28 open.
These 28 patents involve technologies such as gesture operation, eye tracking, voice interaction, and video playback, and have rich application scenarios in being suitable for the elderly and helping the disabled.
The three enterprises with the largest number of the first batch of freely open patents are Alibaba (11), Ant Group (9), and Kuaishou (4). The accessibility technology patents opened by Ant Group involve methods such as voice broadcast compatibility and interactive voice response methods for elderly accounts.
In April 2022, Ant Group announced that it officially joined the "Low-Carbon Patent Pledge" and opened 7 "green computing" related patents for the first time. Any individual, enterprise, or institution in the world can freely use these patents to promote energy conservation and emission reduction according to this pledge.
In August 2022, Tencent, Microsoft China, Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, Kuaishou, Ant Group, Meituan, Vanke, and Winsun Information and other 10 enterprises jointly announced the establishment of the Carbon Neutral Professional Committee and Open Technology Alliance.
For the first time, the member enterprises of the Carbon Neutral Professional Committee, with the core concept of open sharing, publicly disclosed the patent technologies related to energy conservation and carbon reduction, and opened them to member units. In the first round, 189 patent technologies were shared for free.
The cold data on paper is difficult to explain thoroughly how much social value these actions can create. The experience of an ordinary Internet practitioner may allow people to understand more.
Huan Lu, the product manager of Alipay's identity verification, still remembers the first complaint about accessibility verification he received.
"Someone on the intranet said that his mother is a visually impaired person. When doing the face recognition verification, she was asked to blink at the camera, but she has no eyes."
Different from the inherent impression of most people, visually impaired people use mobile phones very frequently in life. Now smartphones have an accessibility mode that can read the information on the phone screen and turn what is seen into what is heard. Computers with screen reading software can also "listen to the computer".
Relying on the accessibility functions of various software and hardware, blind people can write, be programmers, and be accountants, which exceeds many people's imagination of them. However, similar verification operation failures make many visually impaired people stuck on many small things.
Huan Lu and his team began to wonder if they could develop some identity verification methods that visually impaired users could easily use?
"We designed many actions, such as pressing and holding the screen for a certain period of time, shaking the phone, or drawing a circle, a triangle or even writing a letter in the air with the phone. We designed many, many instructions. We think this is quite good, and the encryption and security are also good. So we went to test with visually impaired friends, and most of the feedback was very good."
But a new problem emerged. A 60-year-old grandmother said, "What is a triangle? I don't understand." It turns out that congenitally visually impaired people cannot imagine those simple graphics. Their understanding of the world is still very different.
Huan Lu and the team further optimized the instructions, eliminating all operations such as "drawing a triangle" and "writing a number", and only keeping the simplest gestures, such as drawing a circle, or shaking and flipping the phone. Through continuous adaptation and improvement, Alipay's accessibility identity verification has gradually been perfected.
In the communication with visually impaired people, Huan Lu found that sometimes the page operation needs to jump. Visually impaired users do not know what happened, and even if the waiting time is only one second, it will make them panic.
How to reduce such "one-second panics"? In technical fields with strong social value and strong public attributes such as carbon neutrality and accessibility, opening general technologies has become a tacit consensus and common action of large domestic and foreign technology enterprises.
Huan Lu's idea is simple and sincere, "It is actually not a single product, but a set of underlying capabilities. It can be used for identity verification, and it can also be used in other places, such as Alipay's 'Five Blessings Collection' mini-game. We also open it to other Internet products, hoping that other 'blind paths' can also be repaired with this brick."