Posts in Interviews & Conversations

Inventors are NOT patent trolls and they are NOT the problem

Large companies can steal your patented technology, make a great deal of money, ignore you all together, and then have the resources, the vast resources in most cases, to delay your enforcement actions or actually destroy your patents by any means necessary. So the only recourse left for me and others like me is to bring suite to protect my invention – my intellectual property rights. However, the loser pay clause in HR 9 would be a showstopper for me. Bringing a suit against a patent infringer would be too much of a risk for me and my family now and I’ve already used my life savings and family inheritance and hard work for over 15 years plus the untold impact on my family just to develop and maintain my patents. I just do not believe the independent inventor is the problem.

The European technical standard as a guide for drafting software patents

”A few years ago we ramped up our foreign filings and recognized that we’re writing this one document, this one patent application for so many different audiences. We started settling in on the European technical standard as a guide for how to draft, how to cover the innovation from that vantage point, in order to try to write this document that would satisfy the USPTO as well as the EPO, Chinese Patent Office, the Japanese Patent Office, and so on. So for me, what this environment means as a practitioner has more to do with how the patent is drafted and how we capture the innovation, and not really a huge difference about what the underlying innovation is or how it’s implemented.”

Congress Seeks to Fix Unfair, Outdated Royalties for Songwriters and Composers

According to Congressman Collins, who I spoke with via telephone on Friday, March 6, 2015, there was a great deal of treatment of the SEA at the subcommittee level during the 113th Congress, but now during the 114th Congress consideration will move to the full Committee level, which suggests a seriousness about getting something done. ”Music licensing will be an area where something bubbles up this Congress,” Collins explained. ”I’m hoping the industry will come together.”

Litigation abuse driving negative sentiment around patents

”[L]itigation abuse is driving so many of the issues and so much of the negative sentiment around patents generally. Certainly it’s important to ensure that quality patents are issued, with quality examinations, and quality patents are filed from a disclosure standpoint. The problem is largely addressed with the patent owners and how they’re asserting and using and abusing their rights versus how those rights may or may not come out of the Patent Office.”

America Must be the Leader in Patenting Innovations, Including Software

I do feel that the whole notion of trying to find an “inventive concept” is really challenged. While the Supreme Court went out of its way to say we are really not putting Sections 102 or 103 in here, I think what’s happening is the Courts are basically trying to do that. And they’re looking deeply into prior art in some cases to knock out patents under Section 101 and whittle away the invention, and trying to find the abstract idea by doing a prior art analysis, and I think that’s troubling.

Writing software is easy, but writing good software is very difficult

On January 20, 2015, I interviewed Fatih Ozluturk, a prolific inventor who has close to 200 patents to his credit and a similar number of patent applications still pending. His inventions have been licensed by every major cellular OEM, and have created over $1 billion in licensing revenue. Today Ozluturk continues as an inventor himself, but he is also now an…