Posts Tagged: "interview"

Doug Croxall is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Marathon Patent Group, which is a patent acquisition and licensing company. I met Croxall in New York City in November 2014 at the IP Dealmakers Forum. Croxall has been successful in the patent monetization business for years and had a unique prospective on patents as an asset. “If you are going invest your family’s fortune, I don’t think you will put all your money in one equity,” Croxall explained on the panel so it is the same thing with respect to an asset or a portfolio of assets.” He would go on to say that Marathon Patent Group has learned from “what worked in other asset areas and applied it to this one.”

KNOWLES: “We are seeing a strong anti-innovation sentiment in the U.S. not just on the issue of obviousness but also on patent eligibility. We’re seeing a rewriting of patent law through judicial decisions which have draconian effect on the industry that judges have not given full consideration of the larger impact of. And I might go even further to say that judges are not sufficiently trained or authorized to overhaul the patent system through the judiciary. The judiciary is taking over the job of Congress. I think that’s what we are seeing.”

Sherry Knowles: “If a company identifies a weak patent now, it might file an inter partes review or post grant review at the U.S. Patent Office. Ten years ago I don’t think any of us would have imagined that the best jurisdiction in the world to invalidate a patent would be the United States.”

Siegel: “I think this effort to destroy the value of intellectual property is a bigger wet towel on innovation. When startup companies, after they get their angel investing, go out to try and raise funds on round Bs and round Cs, one of the things that investors look at is whether or not that company has an innovation that is different and protectable so that the investors know that number one there is something in there that’s protectable so that they can protect their investment. And when companies, small companies that make the investment into intellectual property portfolio development it sends a signal, two signals. It sends a signal that, number one, they’re progressive enough and smart enough to think about protecting their innovation. And, number two, it provides collateral for the investments that the investors are making into the company. So if the company were to not be successful in its business, they would have this asset of an IP portfolio sitting there that could still be sold or otherwise monetized to help the investors recoup their investments.”

LEMLEY: “People have been writing claims that don’t emphasize the technological contribution of the innovation. And I think that’s part of the problem. And I think if we can write claims that really highlight the technological contribution then the Court maybe is going to be inclined to view those differently. And more favorably.”

LEMLEY: “I think Alice is a real sea change on the patentable subject matter issue. I’ve heard a lot of folks talk about how Alice doesn’t really use the word “software” so it doesn’t really change anything, but I honestly think that’s wishful thinking… I think a lot of patent lawyers had talked ourselves into thinking that the Court didn’t really mean it in Mayo when it talked about having to add a significant inventive component beyond the abstract idea or the natural process. But the court in Alice makes it clear that if your patent covers an implementation of an idea we want proof of an inventive concept beyond that idea before we’ll grant you a patent.

“[F]or a living I reverse engineer code and testify in court. Yet I could not reverse engineer this code. Every time I touched it to make some kind of change to test it, the whole thing broke. And I finally had to write the code completely from scratch because this open source code was such a kludge, such a mess, that it was impossible for me to figure out… [T]here’s a bunch of issues here and maybe some of them are that programmers nowadays aren’t well trained and they’re not well disciplined in programming techniques… [they] write code as quickly as you can, throw it out there, people will debug it for you. So first of all maybe we need to be teaching more discipline to programmers. We need to… convince them, hey, now that you’ve really gone through a rigorous program it’s not just okay to throw stuff together but create something with a structure that’s debuggable, that’s understandable, and that is innovative and patentable.”

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Bob Zeidman, the president and founder of Zeidman Consulting, who is also the president and founder of Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation, Zeidman is an software expert. In fact, in addition to consulting with lawyers and technology companies, he is an testifying and consulting expert witness. The premise of our conversation was the upheaval in the patent industry thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank. In part 1 of our conversation we discussed the decision and ways that attorneys can build a specification to satisfy the Alice standard. In part 2 of our 3 part discussion, which appears below, we wrap up our discussion of the Alice decision and dive into a discussion about the fact that many in the computer science world don’t believe what they do to be particularly innovative or even special.

Modern software tools allow people to turn fairly abstract ideas into reality. That’s the beauty of software. You can start describing things in such a high level and yet output what I consider an innovative invention. And so how do we separate abstract ideas that are unpatentable from an actual software implementation is going to be really difficult. And I don’t think this ruling helps…. One of the reasons there’s an explosion in software patents is that it’s really easy to create a software patent without having written the code. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But I do know, I have seen patents where there have been code snippets that don’t work. And I think that’s one thing to be careful of.

Judge Michel: “I’m aghast at the suggestions that are made in some blogs that the Federal Circuit be abolished. The idea that you need more so-called percolation by having different appellate courts take different views on patent laws is completely crazy in my opinion. There’s plenty of percolation just within the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court doesn’t seem to have the slightly problem identifying cases where they feel that corrections are needed. Look, I don’t think the Federal Circuit’s perfect. I’m glad there is a Supreme Court. And whether I agree with Alice or don’t agree with Alice or love KSR or didn’t love KSR is really beside the point. Every power center needs some supervision over them. In the case of the Congress it’s the voters. In the case of the court it’s the Supreme Court, or a higher court in the hierarchy. And I think that’s all well and good. So the Federal Circuit isn’t perfect but I think it’s a very good court. I think it’s been a huge improvement over the chaos of before 1982 and the various regional circuits. And so I hope we don’t over correct by getting rid of the Federal Circuit.”

Ray Niro: “The Administration has become a shill for Google — you even have a Google person running the Patent Office. So you have a situation where any number of patents, tens of thousands of patents, are going to be affected by Alice and also by the Limelight decision on split infringement.”