Posts in Interviews & Conversations

Licensing standards and best practices separate good behavior from bad

LES is focused on licensing standards, which will also define best practices to separate patent owners with good behavior from bad behaviors. The committees also contemplate establishing template documents for transactions. The overall idea is that these standards, best practices, and template documents will become the foundation for an accreditation process. And so, yes, we absolutely encourage anyone to join the discussion as it’s being framed now but all participants need to recognize that to meet the standards and accreditation requirements you are going to be accountable yourself to the standards that are defined by these programs.

Demonizing monetizers undermines the patent system

Phil Hartstein is the President and CEO of Finjan Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: FNJN)… On January 6, 2015, I interviewed Hartstein, which appears below. We had a wide ranging and lively discussion about the current state of the patent market, how the pejorative use of the term “patent troll” does nothing but attempt to denigrate innovators as second-class patent owners simply because they don’t manufacture, efforts to promote ethical licensing standards, and patent reform.

To patent or not to patent? The market reality for software patents

If you have any software patent that is essentially a software version of a human practice — something that was done in human practice — and you decide to write up a patent, even if you automated it in such a way and did things that the human brain could never do it will be problematic. If you can look at the patent and then make an argument that humans were doing this outside the software realm before you implemented it in software, under Alice, I think you’ve got a big problem.

Creating start-up success in an anti-patent climate

They use early IPOs as an alternative to traditional venture funding. But one of the things that the investors place a huge importance on is a very sophisticated, robust patent operation. So whereas it used to be you’d have a new company and it could take years even to get some sort of sophistication, we’re now doing it on day one. And the results have been great to see. Over the last few months we have filed close to a hundred patent applications for these entities. We’re able to do that because we have been able to negotiate favorable deals with the law firms we use and we can pass that on to the clients. So our goal is to really be creating companies and crafting their portfolios from day one. Essentially, my partner and I work to insource a very sophisticated patent operation for a company that ordinarily wouldn’t have had that capability.

Inventor Spotlight – Christen Wooley – Inventor of Vetspakz

The concept of her invention has basically stayed the same over the years. She has just added additional colors and sizes and has changed some of the materials they use. I asked her about her journey in taking her invention from prototype to market. She called it a long, incredible journey that has resulted in her Vetspakz currently being sold exclusively online at Eastsport.com.

Working toward settlement where reasonably possible

It’s important, particularly for technology companies in fast moving industries, to keep their eyes focused on the future and competing in the marketplace rather than focused on the past and competing in the courtroom, other than in a small number of cases where that focus really is absolutely necessary… When we deal with nonpracticing entities in mediation, we have to take them seriously. They are the parties to the lawsuit. They operate the kinds of businesses that they operate. They take positions and have underlying interests that need to be acknowledged as real and sincere. And the parties opposing the nonpracticing entities have to deal with them straight up and sometimes make some difficult decisions as to whether to settle and how much money to pay.