Posts Tagged: "patent wars"

A Poor History of Wright Brothers Concludes they were Patent Trolls

In the first sentence of the entire article, the author falls prey to a misconception often parroted by those with anti-patent viewpoints, namely that patent protection is a “government-granted monopoly.” Yes, the patent is granted by the government, and yes, it offers an inventor the right to exclude others from the market, but a patent provides no promise of a monopoly or any market success whatsoever. More than 90 percent of patents cover technologies that will not be commercialized. If there’s no market, there’s no monopoly. Instead, patents help to create markets by creating an enforceable property right capable of attracting investment and warding off free-riders if in fact a market does ultimately exist… But the Mises Institute’s author even notes that Curtiss continued to design aircraft control methods that wouldn’t infringe on the Wright Brothers’ patent, an unwitting recognition of the fact that patent protection encourages innovators to find ways to invent without infringing on a patent.

Nokia, Apple drag the world back to patent war

Being targeted by PAEs is nothing new for Apple — but in an anti-trust complaint dated December 20, 2016, Apple finally said enough was enough. Pulling no punches, Apple accused the PAEs of “conspiring with Nokia in a scheme to diffuse and abuse [standard essential patents] and, as the PAEs and Nokia fully intended, monetize those false promises by extracting exorbitant non-FRAND royalties in way Nokia could not”. Using PAEs for direct attacks against Apple would be a smart, albeit sneaky, strategy for Nokia. Since PAEs do not themselves sell any products, there would be little risk of a countersuit from Apple – as well as a general lack of commitment to FRAND licensing terms that spell lower royalties.

Myths of the Patent Wars: An “Explosion Of Patent Litigation” Greater Than Any in History?

These deceptive claims are meant to justify and buttress a legislative agenda aimed at immunizing this small coterie of technology giants from the costs of their patent infringing behavior… The estimated 124-plus smartphone patent suits filed between 2009-2012 are less than one-quarter the number of patent suits filed during the first “Telephone Wars” of Alexander Graham Bell’s time. Back then, the American Bell Telephone Company and its successor, AT&T, litigated an astonishing 587 patent cases alone. Even more surprising, given the common belief in a patent litigation “explosion” today, patent and legal records from the golden age of the U.S. Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century show that the patent litigation rate at that time — defined as the number of patent suits filed in a decade divided by the number of patents issued in that decade — reached 3.6 percent.

Do Patents Promote Innovation? The Market is the Final Arbiter

In my opinion the best way to judge the success or failure of the patent system is by looking broadly at the type of competition it enables or disables in the marketplace. And that doesn’t mean focusing solely on patent litigation statistics – of course there are going to be fights when such a high stakes prize as mobile computing is up for grabs and of course firms competing with such different business models are going to come into conflict. But look at what that competition has done for innovation and product advances and for consumer choice and pricing. You need the option of patent protection to provide the necessary freedom of choice in market approach, (whether it is open, proprietary or a blend of both), to enable competition between firms employing different market approaches and the innovation engendered by that competition.. The correct focus for this issue is not the intrinsic merit of the concept of patent protection, but rather what the existence of patents does to promote business model diversity and what that in turn does to promote innovation. This is the important point and at least in my view it seems clear that having patents enables more business model diversity and consequently more innovation than not having them.

The Beginning of the End for the Smart Phone Patent Wars?

First, remember that Steve Jobs once referred to the smartphone patent wars as the patent equivalent of global thermonuclear war. But will this be more like the Cold War or the Apocalypse? The only patent war that I can recall that actually approximated a patent version of the Apocalypse was the battle between Polaroid and Kodak. That saw a $909 million verdict in 1990, and ultimately settled for $925 million about a year later, but required total aggregate attorneys fees in the neighborhood of $550 million. The war lasted 15 years and didn’t achieve the $2.5 to $5 billion that once upon a time was believed possible. This was also at a time when these numbers were real money.