The information the FTC has been collecting regarding patent assertion entities is extensive. Along with standard corporate information, the FTC is making a survey of each patent in PAE portfolios going back to 2008 to investigate the date of patent acquisition, the patent’s maintenance fee status as well as the assertion history for all patents upon which the PAE has attempted to enforce its rights. Firms are also being asked to describe their business model, the methods used to organize their patent portfolios and the aggregate costs of patent acquisition and assertion. The FTC has sent information requests to 25 PAEs in order to build its evidence.
The United States Copyright Office and George Mason University School of Law announced last Friday that they have formed an academic partnership, working through Mason Law’s recently-launched Arts & Entertainment Advocacy Clinic, directed by Professor Sandra Aistars.
Critics argue that intellectual property is bad for innovation in part because it allows for “monopolies” that prevent the public from using certain creations without permission for a period of time. As a preliminary matter, the use of the misleading scare-term “monopolies” to describe property rights in inventive and creative labor is clearly an attempt to skew the debate from the outset. After all, you wouldn’t call property rights in hard-copy creations, like the crops a farmer harvested, “monopolies” in those creations. Furthermore, if public access is the concern, a system that fails to provide inventors and creators the economic freedom to create things to market to the public in the first place will be far more harmful than a system that secures justly-earned property rights in inventors’ and artists’ productive labors.