Looking Back on Five Years With IPWatchdog

Steve Brachmann, Writer, IPWatchdog

Somewhere near the end of 2011, I responded to an ad that was left on Craigslist. A website called IPWatchdog.com was looking for a writer to contribute content on Apple’s patenting activities. By this time, I had decided to see what kind of career prospects I had in freelance writing. I had a good deal of experience, including an internship during the summer of 2010 with The Buffalo News, which showed me the inner workings of the newsroom for a major daily paper, but most work I had found to that point only lasted a few months at most.

The job seemed straightforward enough: just write about innovations being patented by Apple. Tech writing seemed interesting and every Tuesday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would issue new patents detailing these innovations; on Thursdays, I’d also take a look at patent applications published by the USPTO. And then, I actually read a patent for the first time. I cannot remember the first few patents I read. I can, however, remember the intense mental anguish I felt while trying to understand the highly technical and legal language of patents. Comprehension of patent claims is not for the weak of heart.

Over time, the work I did for IPWatchdog expanded. Instead of focusing on Apple innovations, Gene told me to branch out and look at the innovations being patented by a variety of tech giants. What evolved from that was our Companies We Follow series, a regular look into the innovations developed by the likes of Google, IBM, Samsung and others. For the next year or so, I’d cycle through a group of eight to ten of these tech giants, covering their recent innovations while facing a learning curve regarding computer-implemented methods and other elements of patent claims with which I didn’t have a great deal of familiarity.

Eventually, the topic areas I covered for IPWatchdog began to broaden to areas like NASA innovations and missions as well as regulatory activity spurred on at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Over time, Gene and I would end up developing a few other successful series including both the Evolution of Technology as well as the Disaster Tech series. Instead of confining my reporting to a small group of tech firms, I was free to chase news headlines and give my perspective on topics like Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s duplicitous stance on patents or Google’s corporate conversion to the Alphabet holding company, to name a couple. At the same time, I was also able to follow-up on fun story topics like giant robot battles or innovations related to barbecue and grilling. Every few weeks, I would send Gene a long list of story ideas I came up with by looking through business and technology news reports. By the beginning of 2017, Gene had set me free to follow whatever story I wanted, telling me that, “You know this audience well.” Currently, I consider myself to have one of the most enviable jobs in the writing world: I’m very free to set my own editorial focus and I have no shortage of interesting topics to cover for an audience which has continued to build over the past five years.

During 2017, my writing work took on an entirely new dimension as the many issues of the United States’ current patent landscape came into a much sharper focus. I was already familiar with the very slanted nature of “patent troll” rhetoric which is still rife in the patent world but the International IP Commercialization Council’s (IIPCC) policy event at Congress that May was tremendously eye-opening. It wasn’t until that event that I heard firsthand from those with a great deal of experience on patent law about the deleterious effects that such rhetoric was having on the country’s patent system in the service of promoting patent reforms which have had the effect of reducing the rights of patent owners. Uncertain patentability of inventions in the United States, the many problems inherent at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and China’s surprising stance on strong intellectual property rights have made up a good deal of my recent coverage and will likely remain in focus for the foreseeable future.

Over the past five years, I’ve learned a lot about what it means to be an inventor in today’s patent system. I’ve learned that, unless you have the deep wallets to create advocacy groups which beat the drums for further patent reforms in service to the efficient infringer lobby, you tend to get railroaded by the system. I’ve learned that there’s an incredibly thin line between inventors and patent trolls and that it only takes a single lawsuit for the political leadership in Washington to view you as a troll. I’ve learned that that same leadership has been so zealous about pursuing patent reform that they scoff at the notion that China may have a better patent law regime than the United States.

In short, I’ve learned that the United States of today is not the same country where the famed garage inventor can become a business success thanks to hard work and ingenuity. Today, the true beneficiaries of innovation seem to be those well-entrenched interests who can copy without great fear of reprisal, leaving the actual inventors without any true ability to commercialize and profit from their intellectual property. In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, the child Wart would be taught to avoid the philosophy that “Might is Right” well before he ascended to the throne at Camelot as King Arthur. As far as U.S. patent law is concerned, such a philosophy on might being right seems to have unfortunately infected the reform debate, especially in recent years.

With five solid years of work spent covering a wide expanse of the activities related to the tech and legal worlds, I’m honestly quite grateful for what has come to pass ever since I answered that Craigslist ad. The stories we’ve covered may involve a good deal of inconvenient truths but they are stories that need to be told if we’re to have any hope for a return to a fairer system of adjudicating patentability and enforcing patent rights in this country. There’s also no small amount of surprise that I feel at the fact that patent law was where writing took me; I grew up thinking that I might write books or scripts and even when my focus turned towards journalism, I had never contemplated intellectual property as a specific area to cover. It’s been such an interesting ride thus far that I’ve started considering what a law degree might mean for my future. While those plans are in their very early stages and life is often wont to take some unexpected turns, I am very excited to see where this work will lead over the next five years and beyond.

Share

Warning & Disclaimer: The pages, articles and comments on IPWatchdog.com do not constitute legal advice, nor do they create any attorney-client relationship. The articles published express the personal opinion and views of the author as of the time of publication and should not be attributed to the author’s employer, clients or the sponsors of IPWatchdog.com.

Join the Discussion

12 comments so far.

  • [Avatar for staff]
    staff
    January 9, 2018 12:19 pm

    ‘Today, the true beneficiaries of innovation seem to be those well-entrenched interests who can copy without great fear of reprisal, leaving the actual inventors without any true ability to commercialize and profit from their intellectual property. ‘

    Precisely. You’ve hit the nail on the head. Today for inventors and other small businesses it is far too hard, slow and expensive for us to get, keep and enforce patents for our inventions. For us the patent system is now a sport of thieves. We have been ‘reformed’ to death by our large infringers. It never was their intent to fix the patent system, but rather to destroy or disable it and thereby make it easy for them to rob and crush their small competitors. Whenever we have to fight to get, keep or assert our patents we go out of business.

    For our position and the changes we advocate (the rest of the truth) to restore the patent system, or to join our effort, please visit us at https://aminventorsforjustice.wordpress.com/category/our-position/
    or, contact us at aifj@mail.com

  • [Avatar for Night Writer]
    Night Writer
    January 4, 2018 11:36 pm

    You do a great job! (You were wrong, though, about McDonald’s).

  • [Avatar for Poesito]
    Poesito
    January 4, 2018 10:10 pm

    Steve, I’m even more impressed with your work after reading the backstory above. Amazing that you found the job through Craigslist.

  • [Avatar for Gene Quinn]
    Gene Quinn
    January 4, 2018 03:23 pm

    Scott-

    Yes, IP includes more than patents. We are continuing to endeavor to get more content relating to trade secrets, copyrights and trademarks. Trade secret expert Jim Pooley (who has literally written a treatise on trade secrets) started writing a monthly column for us at the end of 2017, which will continue into 2018. I would love to find attorneys who specialize in copyrights and trademarks interested in similarly writing a monthly column. We will continue in 2018 to expand our focus to the extent we can provide useful content and information on the field.

    Cheers.

  • [Avatar for Scott Smith]
    Scott Smith
    January 4, 2018 02:39 pm

    Good post and points. Just don’t forget that intellectual property also includes trademarks and copyrights, not just patents.

  • [Avatar for Eugene Schuster]
    Eugene Schuster
    January 4, 2018 05:42 am

    Thank you Steve for your insightful stories. Appreciated from Sydney, Australia.

  • [Avatar for Bemused]
    Bemused
    January 3, 2018 04:13 pm

    Steve great work on IP Watchdog and thank you for not pulling any punches when it comes to writing about the bad acts and the bad actors in the patent world.

  • [Avatar for Kevin Rieffel]
    Kevin Rieffel
    January 3, 2018 12:29 pm

    You certainly have an audience here!

  • [Avatar for penny]
    penny
    January 3, 2018 10:34 am

    I always enjoy reading your articles!

  • [Avatar for Paul Morinville]
    Paul Morinville
    January 3, 2018 10:16 am

    It is a fight worth every cut and bruise and you have been a very good soldier digging in to the details and simplifying the story. Thank you for that.

  • [Avatar for EG]
    EG
    January 3, 2018 09:12 am

    Hey Steve,

    Thanks for your astute and interesting contributions to our “nook of the law.”

  • [Avatar for Bluejay]
    Bluejay
    January 3, 2018 08:09 am

    Good work.