Posts Tagged: "media bias"

It is difficult to witness people like Gary Shapiro self-righteously railing against the patent system when they stand to gain from weakened patent rights… Shapiro continues on his defense of the PTAB by noting similarities between patent validity challenges and trials: “Lawyers make their case to the Patent Trials and Appeals Board (PTAB), and three highly qualified administrative patent judges hear their case and come to a decision.” Highly qualified or not, there is at least one administrative patent judge (APJ) who has sat on panels issuing final written decisions on trials petitioned by a former employer, a situation which would require a sua sponte recusal in district court to answer any concerns over potential conflicts of interests. Furthermore, the Patent Office has admitted to stacking PTAB panels so that cases are decided in the manner desired by the Director, which is as difficult to believe as it is stunning. Clearly, the PTAB is not an independent tribunal that exercises decisional independence. The PTAB has also removed pro-patent decisions from its database, refused to consider timely submitted evidence, fundamentally misappled the law of obviousness, determined that an MRI machine is an abstract idea, and blatantly ignoring the law with respect to CBM patents. Shapiro paints a picture of a PTAB that defies experience and simply is not realistic.

The media study shows high subjectivity among patent infringement news coverage, with 42% of the articles surveyed advocating a specific narrative… The study, which focused on coverage of patent infringement cases from 15 publications across business, tech and general news, finds that subjectivity in patent infringement coverage may be fostering a narrow view of patents and patent owners within their readership. This subjectivity calls into question the newsworthiness of patent infringement reporting among many major news outlets, including Forbes, Fortune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ars Technica and more.

These first-level-thinkers just assume that information would be disseminated at the same rate without a patent system, which is so ridiculous it is hard to take anyone seriously who actually professes to believe such nonsense. Can anyone really believe that? This is why it seems overwhelmingly clear to me that there is an anti-patent agenda in many newsrooms across the country. No intelligent person who has reviewed history and has any knowledge about how business works would think that businesses would randomly disclose proprietary information in the volume that occurs today absent a patent system that incentivizes such disclosure.

In a recently published Forbes.com article titled”The Federal Circuit, Not the Supreme Court, Legalized Software Patents,” Lee doubled down with his absurd and provably incorrect assertions regarding the patentability of software patents. But he also more or less sheepishly admitted that his reading of the most relevant case is not one that is widely accepted as correct by anyone other than himself. He wrote: “To be clear, plenty of people disagree with me about how Diehr should be interpreted.” Thus, Lee admits that his primary assertion is one he created from whole cloth and contrary to the widely held views to the contrary. Of course, the fact that his radical views are in the minority was conveniently omitted from his ?Ars Technica? article. If Lee has any integrity he will issue a public apology to the Federal Circuit and issue a retraction. If Lee doesn’t come to his senses and do the right thing in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is wrong then Forbes.com and Ars Technica should step in and do what needs to be done.

Indeed, few articles have struck a nerve in me quite the way that a recent Ars Technica article did. The article is titled How a rogue appeals court wrecked the patent system??. It is a cheap shot, factually inaccurate and embarrassingly incorrect “news” story that concludes the Federal Circuit is at the heart of all the problems in the patent system. A real Pinocchio tale. Ars Technica? should be ashamed at having published such an inaccurate attack piece. If they are not going to properly vet articles in advance of publication then what have they become? Little more than an online technology specific version of those tabloids with the salacious headings. The patent system is far to important to the U.S. economy and our way of life to suffer from that level of journalistic ignorance and bias.