Posts Tagged: "florian mueller"

So here we are, many years later and IV’s philosophy seems to have changed. No longer is litigation a poor way to monetize patents, but rather IV sees itself as having a responsibility to litigate. The self-righteousness of IV’s claims is why they engender such distrust, even bordering on hatred. For so long they came in peace and now that they have the leverage they seem to be playing a different tune, and using patent litigation with greater frequency. They accumulated patents over time, sometimes getting as much as $50 million from companies like Google, eBay, Sony, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia and others, ostensibly for the purpose of obtaining a defensive patent position. Oh how the tables have turned.

If you are a user of Twitter you have probably seen more than a few tweets using “#FF” followed by a number of names. #FF stands for “Follow Friday.” On Fridays many Twitter users will suggest who others should follow by tweeting with the hashtag #FF. If this is gobbledygook to you where have you been? Twitter is a great way to stay up to day with news and information from the sources that you like the most. You need to get on the Twitter bandwagon and give it a try!

The mutually assured destruction approach to patenting can explain in part why large companies continue to patent at the rate they do, but the justification completely misses the point that these large tech giants were not always large. They were, at one time, rather small companies that pursued an aggressive agenda of innovation. A big part of that innovation strategy included obtaining protection for said innovation, largely in the form of acquiring patents. That undeniable truth makes it hard not to question whether the tech giants that lament the failings of the patent system and want to limit or abolish it are simply engaging in good old-fashioned protectionism.

Article One Partners is at it again, this time with four patents in the cross-hairs owned by the company suing Apple App Developers for patent infringement — Lodsys. Article One Partners has made a name for itself as the premiere crowd sourcing, prior art locating company in the world. Now they have three different studies aimed squarely at the four Lodsys patents, which were just used earlier this week to sue the New York Times and others, and earlier still against Best Buy, Adidas, CVS and others. Indeed, it seems that Lodsys is becoming quite a nuisance for defendants, which places them at or near the top of the patent troll most wanted.