Posts Tagged: "eff"

Joe Mullin, a policy analyst at the the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), recently penned a misleading article about the Inventor Rights Act  (H.R. 5478). He says it will promote and protect patent trolls. To unravel what he really means, it is first necessary to understand early stage investment, and from there, to define what a “patent troll” truly is. Through organizations like EFF and their companion organization, Engine, Big Tech often writes scary stories about how patent trolls hide under bridges for no other reason than to utterly destroy innovation. Very scary stuff. Scary because this fantasy has misled the courts, Congress, and multiple administrations, convincing them to change the law in ways that destroyed America’s startup engine. Scary because early stage investment is fleeing to China at the expense of American startups. Scary because it has created perpetual Big Tech monopolies with no allegiance to the United States that are immune to American competition and taxes. These forces now control what we read and say, how we vote, and even what we believe to be true.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office promotes Scott Boalick to Chief Judge of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB); the agency also announces a new pilot program for motions to amend at the PTAB; India’s Cabinet votes to bring trademark and industrial design law into accord with international standards; a trial date is set in the copyright case brought by the heirs of Marvin Gaye against Ed Sheeran; a Southern California district judge rules that a Dr. Seuss/Star Trek mash-up is a transformative fair use; Apple alleges that someone has tampered with a key witness in the Qualcomm patent infringement case; and UK finance ministers issue a report calling for more antitrust activity against American tech giants, including Facebook and Google.

Google’s efforts to decimate the U.S. patent system to protect its own interests is a fact of life that is becoming more clear day by day. The latest scathing report, published in May by the watchdog organization Campaign for Accountability, highlights Google’s unscrupulous activities in supporting the efforts of organizations like Engine Advocacy and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), organizations portraying themselves as advocates for smaller entities but instead attempt to influence the political debate on Google’s behalf in many areas, including patent reform.

On Monday, August 7th, a judicial panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit entered a decision in Personal Audio, LLC v. Electronic Frontier Foundation which is being widely hailed by the anti-patent crowd. The three judges on the panel issued a majority opinion, authored by Circuit Judge Pauline Newman, upheld a final written decision issued by…

In an IPR brought by Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Personal Audio appealed a Board determination that invalidated its patent for storing and distributing episodic media files. Personal Audio challenged the Board’s claim construction, but the Court affirmed the Board. Before reaching the merits, the Court addressed whether EFF had standing to participate in the appeal in view of Consumer Watchdog v. Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. In that case, a non-profit organization representing the public interest did not have standing to appeal a PTAB decision, because it did not meet the Article III case-and-controversy requirement.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) unveiled a proposed recommendation that would extend the Internet standards organization’s HTML5 standard to incorporate Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a specification which provides a communication channel between web browsers and digital rights management (DRM) agent software. The proposed new standard has raised a bit of controversy among Internet industry groups despite a reasoned argument from W3C founder and Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee… Some industry organizations, like the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), are religiously opposed to DRM and are zealous in their conviction that the W3C’s proposal “is simply a back door for media companies to require proprietary player software.”

EFF’s Reclaim Invention Act, Draft Model Statute may seem an odd approach to folks in DC but when lined up with a state-level lobby of IP-uninformed and angry local businesses lobby, state legislators will be impressed. So notwithstanding EFF’s effectiveness on the Hill weakened by its issue multitasking, it will have stronger standing in state legislatures. Its research university troll-targeted sanctions proposal therefor must not be taken lightly. Beyond the law’s ironic fiscal resemblance to patent troll “do what I say or pay” troll conduct, the Model Law’s enactment will add even more uncertainty to private sector investment in early stage innovation. Worse, because of its open-man-hole patent nullification mechanism stationed at costly commercialization’s successful endpoint, pure licensing firms like Qualcomm, and research universities will be exposed to expanded freeloader accessibility as another nail of uncertainty is pounded into the coffin of patent exclusivity.

Another incursion into research university governance and operations is now underway. And this time all research universities are affected. Led by the DC Based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leftist anti-patent activist coalition that has initiated a 50-state legislative campaign to shrink research university patent licensing rights at the state level. (See) The measure’s purported objective is to prevent publicly funded university research patents from being licensed to so-called “Patent Assertion Entities” (PAEs, also known by the pejorative term “patent trolls”). The draft legislation is imprecise, making it even more dangerous than first appears.

CUBAN: I have invested in more than 150 companies and never has having or not having a patent impacted the final decision. Small businesses can and do become great without patents. The problem for little guys with patents is that no patent lives in a vacuum. Particularly with software and technology. There is always a work around and you can always find a patent that enables the big guy to sue the little guy. So with just few exceptions the current system doesn’t protect anyone.

While hedging risk is a well known and widely accepted investment tactic, there is something rather bizarre about someone who is such a vocal critic doing exactly what they criticize others for doing.

With so much brash bluster, it was inevitable that Cuban would argue himself into a corner eventually. It finally looks like Cuban’s shoot from the mouth first approach is exposing him as something of a patent hypocrite. More specifically, Mark Cuban recently made threatening comments toward Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT), threatening the retail giant with a patent infringement lawsuit of his own. It would seem that Cuban, like so many others who so loudly want patent reform, have an exceptionally dim view of your patents, but his patents are rock solid and deserve to be respected. Such hypocrisy is not new in the patent reform debate, but it is extremely telling.

Given the collective bias of the witness panel, it is hardly surprising that on the issue of the PATENT Act there was a clear, positive consensus in the witness panel. But there is no such consensus within the industry and those voices were brought to the table by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Chris Coons (D-DE), two of the sponsors of the STRONG Patents Act that has been debated in Senate committee as recently as March. Durbin, who pointed out that “this panel is divided between people who love the bill and people who really love the bill,” read part of a strongly worded letter submitted by the National Venture Capital Association who is worried that the PATENT Act, as worded currently, could hurt investment.

The EFF wants an exemption for people who want to modify their purchased games in order to bypass access controls when a publisher shuts down the server. Specifically, the EFF would like for any piece of software with server-based functions that are shut down by a publisher or developer to be considered “abandoned” six months later. This means that someone who owns a copy of a game that no longer has an online play component would be able to modify the game to eliminate authentication checks or access controls in the game itself so they can still play online using a third party server. This may also include reverse engineering and making intermediate copies of the game, which goes well beyond the skill set of the casual user.