Posts Tagged: "patent troll"

Unified Patents is a relatively new form of patent troll that works as a “Troll of Trolls” or “ToT.” They file IPRs (inter-partes reexamination requests) to kill patents. While they purport to only attack “bad patents,” their definition of a “bad patent” is simply any patent asserted against their clients. So who are their clients? Good question – that is a large part of the problem. They keep most of their clients’ identities secret. Unified does identify a handful of their members on their website such as Adobe, Google, NetApp, Roku, and Salesforce… But China is different. Here, a mercenary third party attacking innovation via patents is problematic. China, unlike America, has made innovation a top priority. China’s government has also, over the last few years, created the best patent enforcement environment in the world.

Because patent trolls prefer filing in the Eastern District of Texas, the thinking goes that it will be a significant blow to patent trolls if the Supreme Court does not agree with the Federal Circuit. In other words, the days will be numbered for patent trolls if the Supreme Court determines that Congress did not expanded patent venue with the 1988 amendment that made the statutory definition of corporate residence found in § 1391 applicable to patent cases. That conventional wisdom is wrong!… Reflection Code has brought patent infringement actions in the Eastern District of Texas, but on March 31, 2017, Reflection Code brought two separate patent infringement lawsuits in the Eastern District of Michigan — one against Bissell, Inc. and the other against Mattel, Inc.

When a product or process worth stealing is created the party that is considered the innovator is the thief and the party that is considered to be standing in the way of innovation is the party that actually invented the thing int he first place. What an entirely screwed up way of viewing the world of innovation!… Obviously, this article was intended to just mention as many patent related buzz words to capture search engine traffic. How else could you pivot from from a discussion of Kyle Bass to a discussion of TC Heartland v. Kraft? … Of course, that doesn’t stop Forbes from saying that patent trolls will be in trouble if the Supreme Court decides “defendants can pull cases from the plaintiff-friendly Eastern Texas district.” But TC Heartland has absolutely nothing to do with the Eastern District of Texas, or Texas, or the South for that matter. And it has absolutely nothing to do with patent trolls either! Of course, you’d never know that from reading Forbes. In fact, you’d think the exact opposite.

If the Supreme Court were to reverse the Federal Circuit and revert back to Fourco Glass, that would make it difficult for patent owners, including Whirlpool and others like them, to reasonably seek redress for patent infringement. Essentially, a reversion back to Fourco Glass would mean that patent infringement cases brought by corporations like Whirlpool would have to literally be brought in the home court of the patent infringer, or perhaps in Delaware where so many entities are incorporated. It would also necessitate a multiplicity of lawsuits, as Whirlpool explained in its amicus filing.

The patent troll problem has always been a creation of large operating companies. They obtained dubious, highly questionable patents. These low quality patents were then sold to other entities so they could specifically and intentionally be used to sue other large operating companies… Post grant challenges were created in the AIA for the express purpose of getting rid of these low quality patents. The large operating companies that so desperately lobbied for new procedures to challenge these low quality patents instead continue to pay extortion-like settlements to patent trolls who apparently continue to sue alleging infringement of low quality patents.

IP departments are often forced to spend their limited budget defending patent troll lawsuits targeted at the base computing and service layers instead of where it should be spent – protecting application layer innovation. There has been no shortage of such litigation due to the glut of vague and ambiguous software patents directed to basic computing technologies. These broad, vague patents have become glaring targets for trolls, who are eagerly buying them up and asserting them wherever they can. As a result, companies are being sued for patent infringement for things that aren’t directly related to their end products and services.

If Bill Hewlett and David Packard were just starting in their garage, they might be wise not to waste money acquiring them… An individual inventor, or SME, may defend patented inventions against unauthorized use – by everyone and anyone. However, it is disingenuous to say it is reasonable for them to do so, no matter what Congressional soundbites trumpet. The system is severely biased against these entities to the point of no longer serving them.

The springing license does offer at least some protection in the future against patent aggregators looking to monetize IP assets, but it wouldn’t stop any party, including an actual patent troll, from sending a demand letter asserting rights to a patent outside of the Azure IP Advantage portfolio. But, how those in the program can be use one of Microsoft’s patents to defend against a patent troll seems rather questionable. By definition a patent gives the owner the right to do nothing other than exclude. So even if you have lawfully acquired rights through the owner you’ve acquired no affirmative rights, just a promise from the owner that they won’t exclude you from what it is that you are doing. Therefore, you cannot defend a patent litigation against a patent troll or any patent owner by pointing to a patent you have rights to use because that isn’t how a patent works.

NPEs are uniquely positioned to help China by attacking foreign entities to clear the way for Chinese companies by exerting pressure in ways that only NPEs can. Even if Chinese semiconductor companies had the necessary patents and experience to engage their foreign competitors, they would risk retaliation from these foreign parties. NPEs, on the other hand, can unilaterally attack foreigners without fear of retaliatory patent suits. Although there are a few of antitrust issues, I do not believe that NPEs that act in the best interest of China should, or will, be attacked by the NDRC or any other antitrust agency in China.

Suffice it to say that 2016 has been an interesting year. The political climate is much different than one year ago amidst a growing tide of nationalism abroad and populism here in the United States. Throw in a massive migration crisis stemming from the Middle East, a slew of unexpected celebrity passings and the fact that the Chicago Cubs are lovable losers no more, and we’re about to wind down a year which seems nearly mythological in stature… As we turn the page onward to 2017, it’s a good time to take another look at some of the major trends shaping the IP and technology landscape in the United States and abroad. From increasing competition with an Asian powerhouse to the continuation of a misleading narrative about patent system abuses, the past year leaves us with many important narratives to consider for the year ahead.

Patents and the innovators who own them do not “cost” the U.S. economy tens of billions of dollars each year. This claim has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked… But for a moment let’s buy into the fraud. If you actually do the math, which the Internet Association and infringer lobby obviously has never done, you will be amazed as how inconsequential even their grossly inflated estimates of cost are in terms of the scale of the overall U.S. tech economy… If the problems with patents are so awful because they create such a windfall for patent owners doesn’t that just admit that these companies are misleading their own shareholders and perhaps even not maximizing value?

The Supreme Court has run two areas of technology, bio and software, into a legal ditch from which there is no escape…. It should be no surprise then that research and progress in these two fields is decamping and moving off-shore, along with the attendant jobs and economic activity. In essence, the boundless technical future, upon which the US economy has long thrived, is being given to others with whom the US competes… As for the 35 USC 101 conundrums, here’s the fix. DO NOT MODIFY 101! Rather, modify the definitions in 35 USC 100 as follows, and also supply a one paragraph legislative history as to why this definition was changed.

Peter Thiel, Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner are hosting technology industry giants for a policy discussion at Trump Tower on December 14, 2016. Patent reform is likely to be on the agenda as it is one of the issues tech giants (along with big banks and retailers old and new) have invested in heavily for over a decade… Is it possible that the positions of these three key Trump advisors will coalesce around a nuanced patent policy in a Trump Administration along the lines of the recent FTC PAE report, which sought to distinguish innovators and their need to enforce patent rights from bad actions of those who employ abusive litigation tactics?

Several weeks ago Internet Association President Michael Beckerman sent a letter to President Elect Donald Trump and the Trump Transition Team. The Internet Association is made up of companies that are by and large openly hostile to the U.S. patent system and innovators. The letter touched upon issues ranging from copyright safe harbors under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to recommended reforms to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to open access to the Internet and, of course, patent reform. I will confine my comments (see below) to the Internet Association’s patent reform commentary… Not that it should come as any surprise to anyone who follows the patent reform debate, but what the Internet Association says here is a lie.

Although the tech industry is big in America, the industry itself was not big on the idea of a Trump presidency. Trump, however, did have one very vocal supporter from the tech community: German-American entrepreneur, billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel… There are inklings that the patent troll narrative might actually have sway with Thiel, despite his Silicon Valley outsider status. An article published in September 2014 by Bloomberg pertaining to a corporate restructuring of Intellectual Ventures (IV), a Patent Assertion Entity (PAE) often portrayed in the media as a patent troll, provides some clues. Thiel is quoted as saying: “I think IV is basically a parasitic tax on the tech industry.”