The US PTO issued Internet Data Usage Control System on January 17, 2023. The patent grants broad coverage for JLINC, which provides a new mechanism to control how data may be used after it is exchanged.
Originally developed to give people agency over personal data, as required under GDPR in the EU, JLINC facilitates data exchange between separate systems under human-readable and therefore legally enforceable contracts. It offers the only truly decentralized interoperable technology available to fulfill new personal data laws. JLINC Labs plans to commit the patent to an open protocol for personal data, as well as a variety of other data for good use cases, and to license the latest version of our software directly to enterprise and through partners in verticals.
Beyond personal data, Digital Transformation is moving all business activity to digital platforms. This will require data exchange across myriad systems under the authority of the data owner. Everything from financial, legal, tax and accounting data, to health and medical data, to personal and customer data in commerce, to supply chains and carbon accounting will all be affected. The World Economic Forum, UK, EU and others have called for “data intermediaries”, including data stores, data wallets, data trusts, data unions, data co-operatives and data brokers. JLINC acts as an interoperability layer across all of those emerging functions.
JLINC uses some of the same key technologies that made blockchain possible but in a new way to provide data control and provenance under human-readable, and therefore legally admissible, contractual agreements. Unlike blockchain, JLINC controls data as data, without requiring costly consensus overhead or tokens when it is moved from one system to another. This matches the actual needs of businesses and society, where separate entities on entirely separate systems must track and control the data they exchange under existing legal and accounting standards.
The patent covers cryptographically signed verifiable control over serialized data exchange under human-readable information sharing agreements with immutable audit records, including:
For personal data and a variety of other applications, the JLINC protocol will be available under an open license using open-source software that allows any entity to operate a server but prevents the protocol itself from being forked or co-opted by dominant companies. JLINC Labs plans to provide premier software implementations through partners and direct to enterprise clients under a “business source license” whereby enterprise customers can pay to access the newest version of fully supported software either as a hosted service on a SAAS basis or on-premises behind their firewall. Each version of that code reverts to open-source three years after release. Developers and partners serving customers at smaller scale can also license that code without charge.
