Posts Tagged: "patent thicket"

LITAN: ”Cross industry variation in the use of patents shouldn’t mean that we should just junk the patent system. As I said, the alternatives to go to a system of trade secrets which has very, I think, suboptimal social implications relative to patents. Indeed I think when people object to patents they don’t think about well what else would firms rely on for protecting their hard-earned IP. Indeed, even companies that are heavily involved in the open source world are using patents as a ‘currency’ through which they can achieve collaboration with other firms. That’s why you see big firms like Microsoft and IBM cross license. They do it not only to insulate themselves from infringements against them but because patents are the tickets through which can collaborate with other parties to innovate, make better products and so on.”

Many of you are privy to the problem of excessive patents. You have all seen the articles about yet another cellphone company infringing on yet another patent, but what you’re left with are questions of what all this activity means and how to use that information to act in your best interest– whether you are the CEO of a company…

The story of the invention and development of the sewing machine challenges these two assumptions insofar as it is a story of a patent thicket in an extremely old technology, but, more important, it is a story of the successful resolution of this thicket through a private-ordering mechanism. The Sewing Machine War was not brought to an end by new federal laws, lawsuits by public interest organizations, or new regulations at the Patent Office, but rather by the patent owners exercising their rights of use and disposition in their property. In so doing, they created the Sewing Machine Combination, which successfully coordinated their overlapping property claims until its last patent expired in 1877. Moreover, the Sewing Machine War is a salient case study because this mid- nineteenth-century patent thicket also included many related issues that are often intertwined today with concerns about modern patent thickets, such as a non- practicing entity (i.e., a “patent troll”) suing infringers after his demands for royalty payments were rejected, massive litigation between multiple parties and in multiple venues, costly prior art searches, and even a hard-fought priority battle over who was the first inventor of the lockstitch.