Innovation is sacred. America must protect it

OPINION:

They brand themselves as visionaries. Builders. Stewards of humanity’s progress.

But behind their trillion-dollar empires lies a darker truth: They are slowly destroying the soul of the American startup, the lifeblood of America’s innovation economy.

When Big Tech takes intellectual property without permission, the future pays the price. The incentives that drive the creation of new ideas and sustain America’s innovation economy begin to die.

They argue that exclusive intellectual property rights slow progress. That patents, trade secrets and copyrights are relics of a bygone era. That ideas should be free. On the surface, it sounds noble — a call for shared knowledge and collective advancement.

But don’t be fooled. These are the declarations of men who already sit atop mountains built on the ideas of others and they now pull up the ladder behind them and call it liberation.

This isn’t just hypocrisy killing the American dream. It’s a betrayal of our nation’s founding Constitution, which promises innovators “the exclusive right to their discoveries” to free them from tyranny and abuse of power.

The truth is simple: IP laws don’t slow innovation. They protect and incentivize it.

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office know we have a serious problem that must be fixed.

In a rare joint statement late last month, they urged federal courts to restore injunctions as a standard remedy in patent infringement lawsuits, recognizing that without injunctive relief, America’s startups and innovation economy are at grave risk.

Weakening IP laws weakens America. It weakens a world that relies on America’s universities, startups and broader innovation economy for economic growth.

It also weakens America’s competitiveness with China and other nations.

And it makes revitalizing U.S. manufacturing unsustainable. Manufacturing without IP protection becomes a race to the bottom, a commodity game where competitors copy the innovations of others without consent, compensation or conscience.

The threat to startups isn’t theoretical. It’s happening right now. It’s the new normal.

Recently, Xockets Inc., a Texas-based startup I helped build, filed two federal lawsuits against Amazon for willfully infringing its foundational IP enabling the artificial intelligence revolution.

According to Xockets, after interviewing each of Xockets’ engineers in a “deep dive” meeting to learn all it could about Xockets’ technologies under the pretense of acquiring the company, Amazon walked away — only to later roll out the very AI technologies Xockets pioneered, now embedded in more than 20 million Amazon cloud servers. No license. No payment. No regard for the law.

This is what infringement looks like in the real world, and why injunctions must be restored to stop it.

The idea that Big Tech should have free rein to appropriate the ideas of others isn’t promoting the progress of humanity. It’s a return to the dark ages, to a world where might makes right and creativity without capital is crushed.

If America is to remain a beacon of light, we must restore both the moral and legal framework that protects creators. That means reinstating injunctions and restoring one of the oldest promises in our Constitution: the exclusive right of creators to their creations.

To the tech titans who preach openness while practicing domination: We see you. We will not be silent. A movement is rising to restore the light, to restore what you fear most: a nation that remembers how it became great and dares to become great again.

To the dreamers building startups in garages, in labs, in forgotten corners of this country: Rise up. The time is now. Innovation is sacred. Creation is divine. We must protect it.

• Robert Cote is the founder of Cote Capital, an IP investment firm advancing American innovation. A former IP trial lawyer, he spent over two decades protecting innovators who built new industries. He is Xockets’ board member and early investor, the startup behind the advanced data processing unit, a founding technology powering today’s AI revolution.