Posts Tagged: "Silicon Valley"

Asking whether the industry has gone too far to eradicate weak patents misses the point entirely, and to some extent will allow those who want the patent system to continue its march off the cliff to inappropriately claim the moral high ground. Regardless of how you prefer to characterize problem patents, whether it be as weak, bad, low quality, or invalid, no one wants those problematic patents to issue or be used to harass individuals or businesses as they sometimes have been used by bad actors. But that begs the real question. In an attempt to eradicate the system from those problematic patents have things gotten out of control and, thereby caused collateral damage in an indiscriminate way to all patents, including high quality, strong patents? To that question the answer must be a resounding yes!

In the intellectual property (IP) space, knowledge workers come from both Eastern and Western cultural backgrounds. In Silicon Valley and other hubs of innovation, the melding of societal variations most often goes smoothly. However, sometimes not-fully-assimilated Eastern managers get named to groups heavily involved with patents and trade secrets by well-meaning CEOs or founders. What have they missed? That these Eastern managers do not always sync with Western wage earners put in their charge—especially when it comes to workstyles and idea formation.

Peter Thiel, Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner are hosting technology industry giants for a policy discussion at Trump Tower on December 14, 2016. Patent reform is likely to be on the agenda as it is one of the issues tech giants (along with big banks and retailers old and new) have invested in heavily for over a decade… Is it possible that the positions of these three key Trump advisors will coalesce around a nuanced patent policy in a Trump Administration along the lines of the recent FTC PAE report, which sought to distinguish innovators and their need to enforce patent rights from bad actions of those who employ abusive litigation tactics?

Although the tech industry is big in America, the industry itself was not big on the idea of a Trump presidency. Trump, however, did have one very vocal supporter from the tech community: German-American entrepreneur, billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel… There are inklings that the patent troll narrative might actually have sway with Thiel, despite his Silicon Valley outsider status. An article published in September 2014 by Bloomberg pertaining to a corporate restructuring of Intellectual Ventures (IV), a Patent Assertion Entity (PAE) often portrayed in the media as a patent troll, provides some clues. Thiel is quoted as saying: “I think IV is basically a parasitic tax on the tech industry.”

Of course, the implication being if you are not in favor of a never ending revision of U.S. patent laws then you are somehow an ignorant rube not paying attention to the overwhelming consensus in the industry that vast new patent reform measures are desperately necessary to save America from the evils of innovators hell bent on innovating… Trump not having a clear, well-defined position on a patent reform agenda just means he is paying attention.

Just when you thought the race for the White House couldn’t get any more unpredictable and bizarre, the 2012 Republican Nominee rebuked the current Republican frontrunner, Donald J. Trump. Romney won’t rule out a possibility of accepting the mantle if drafted at the Republican Convention, although he says he will endorse one of the remaining three candidates at some point. There is always the possibility that Romney is trying to keep the door open for someone else, perhaps his former running mate and current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI). Given the Romney turn of events we thought it might be appropriate to take a look at what we know about Romney and Ryan as it pertains to patent and innovation policy.

Does the Democratic Presidential contest suggest that voters think that traditional views on patents or copyrights are on the way out and that collectivism is on the rise? The so-called “Napster generation” is now definitely 30 something and kissing 40. Millennials and how they are using the Internet for work, life and politics may show us a shift in compensation for creativity that is rewarding inclusiveness, building a community and a base of customers. This contrasts with the more traditional top down, broadcast marketing coupled with enforcement of longer term royalties. Silicon Valley and Wall Street at least have embraced the former, it seems, given how much people love to value unicorns these days. But in the past as unicorns grew up the market would demand adherence to traditional top down norms – think Twitter, for example, which had few patents of their own until they purchased 900 patents from IBM shortly after going public.

To a large extent Apple, Microsoft and many other Silicon Valley innovators went along with the anti-patent rhetoric perfected by the Google machine. The Silicon Valley elite who have been bemoaning the patent system and patent trolls succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, convincing everyone of problems that don’t exist. So successful has this misinformation campaign been that now patents owned by everyone in the high-tech sector are at least worth less, if not completely worthless. By taking a short-sighted view of the litigation problems they were facing they took direct aim on the patent system, their own patent portfolios and the essence of their competitive advantage. Institutional shareholders in any company that has lobbied for patent weakening policies and court rulings should be appalled and may well want to seek out attorneys specializing in shareholder lawsuits.

There is no doubt that the Obama position will be loved by Google and other Silicon Valley technology giants that despise the patent system. Given the revolving door between the Obama Administration and Google, the long-term close relationship between President Obama and Google (see here, here and here), and the fact that patent issues don’t resonate with John Q. Public, it seems likely that the President stepping in now to allow him to tout that he is engaged with issues of importance in the minds of tech giants who will be asked for large checks later this week.