patent

6:00 am on November 12, 2013 · law (47), patent (10), patent trolls (1), patents (5), policy (40)

POSTPONED: @Dickstein_LLP @InsideCounsel #PatentTrolls roundtable in NYC

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InsideCounsel + Dickstein Shapiro

InsideCounsel + Dickstein ShapiroTHIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL EARLY 2014

On Tuesday November 19 2013 InsideCounsel and Dickstein Shapiro are hosting an afternoon roundtable that will focus on the issue of patent trolls. The panel will feature the Attorneys General of Missouri, Nebraska, and Vermont speaking about their recent efforts to combat harmful business practices involving patent trolls in their states. The panel also will feature the General Counsels of DuPont, Rackspace, and Walmart US who will speak about the effect patent trolls have had on their businesses. The panel will be moderated by Bernie Nash of Dickstein Shapiro’s State Attorney General Practice. The event includes a budget lunch and a cocktail reception. Admission is free. We have enquired about recording.

What: Patent Troll Roundtable
Where: Intercontinental New York Barclay. 111 East 48th Street. New York, NY 10017
When: POSTPONED UNTIL 2014
Register: http://img.sbmedia.com/perm/strat/sc/psg/ic/dicksteinshapiro/registration.html
Twitter: #patenttrolls

3:45 am on May 17, 2012 · 3d printing (4), copyright (81), csusa (20), patent (10)

Video: Enter the Third Dimension – the legalities of 3d printing @theCSUSA #3dprinting

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On April 16, 2012 The Copyright Society of the USA NY Chapter presented: Enter the Third Dimension (Whether You Like It or Not): The Practical and Legal Ramifications of 3D Printing at The Princeton Club in NYC.

Description: 3D printing, a technological development which may ultimately permit local and even personal on-demand automated manufacturing of goods, has the potential to drastically alter long-standing norms of manufacturing, transportation, and even consumer demand. Is such a potentially disruptive development a net positive or negative? What will be its ultimate consequences, intended or unintended? And how will the law handle – for good or ill – these developments in coming years? This session began with a brief overview of the technology from one of its leading manufacturers. After that, the esteemed panelists discussed some of the legal and business related queries that are sure to arise as 3D printing grows in popularity.



ipod | stills | embed | audio

2:43 pm on May 3, 2012 · patent (10), patents (5), pubpat (1)

Video: The Patent Pollution Problem #GoogleTechTalks #patent #patents

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On April 26 2012 Google Tech Talks hosted Cardozo Professor Daniel B. Ravicher, Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT). In his talk Daniel explained why patent quality is so low in America today, described in detail the ways in which low patent quality is harming Americans, and proposed mechanisms for solving the low patent quality problem.

12:23 am on March 25, 2011 · free culture (25), history (5), mp3 (1), patent (10)

NPR: The History of MP3 #freeculture

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As part of an NPR series on recording formats, a story on mp3 – including an excellent interview with “father of mp3” Karlheinz Brandenburg – yields the full tale of the rise of the format, how it escaped its parents, and became the lingua franca of Internet audio.

from the story:

“We tried to tell the people from music industry early on, and we tried to discuss possibilities how to react to this … The idea was that the music industry wouldn’t just be able to go on, they would have to adapt to the situation as well, and if we now look back these 15 years we have to say they finally did but it was too slow and some strategic errors in there.”

(Another group was convened in 1999 and 2000 to define methods for “secure, legal distribution of music over the Internet,” Brandenburg says.)

“My advice was that they should shoot for a technical standard to get interoperability for all these upcoming services and MP3 players, music players and so on.

“And … that hasn’t changed, very clearly if we don’t reach interoperability for a secured format, then the only surviving format will be format without copy protection and that is what happened in the end.”

6:37 am on October 7, 2010 · facebook (7), patent (10)

Facebook granted patent on GPS based checkins #patent

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Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch reports that Facebook has just been granted a wide-ranging patent on location-based social networking. He writes:

The patent appears to be pretty broad. It covers a “method of sharing locations of users participating in a social networking service at a geographic location.” The location is determined using a “GPS identifier” and it combines a status update with the member’s current location. It also seems to cover what are now known as checkins:

the status information manually provided by the first user on an input module of the mobile device; associating the location information with the status information of the first user in a database; and sending the status information and the location information of the first user to a second user for display.

In other words, Facebook might just have been granted a patent to Foursquare’s (and Gowalla’s) main feature.

3:04 pm on October 5, 2010 · copyright (81), IP (7), NYIA (2), patent (10), trademarks (3), USG (40), USPTO (5)

US Dept. of Commerce launches inquiry into copyright and Internet innovation #freeculture

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US Dept. of Commerce

US Dept. of CommerceThe United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) have issued a notice of inquiry (NOI) into “the relationship between the availability and protection of online copyrighted works and innovation in the Internet economy.”

Comments can be emailed to [email protected]. Deadline is November 19 2010.

Full press release is below:

Read more

4:14 pm on August 30, 2010 · interval research (1), larry downes (3), patent (10), paul allen (1)

Is Paul Allen’s goal patent reform?

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We are all aware of Paul Allen’s recent moves to sue leading Internet companies over a number of patents held by Interval Research.

Larry Downes, author of The Laws of Disruption, has come up with a novel explanation for Allen’s sudden move into litigation – his ultimate aim is patent reform!

From Paul Allen: When a Patent Troll is an Enigma :

Something tells me there’s something else going on. Patent litigation is an elaborate chess game, and it feels like this is a move deep inside a very long-running game. There’s a great deal that’s broken about the patent system. I’m just not sure yet whether this lawsuit is Exhibit A.

What other answer is possible? Here’s at least one crazy possibility (there are crazier ones, but this one at least is plausible). Maybe Allen is not the world’s most famous patent troll. Maybe he’s out to become the world’s most famous patent reformer. Maybe he doesn’t want so much to win as to publicize how dangerous his patents are.

Perhaps in asserting these patents, with their potential to unsettle so much of what is taken as settled business practices in the digital economy, he hopes to force leading tech companies and Congress to acknowledge that the system is broken and fix it. If he wins, or even if he just wears down the other side, perhaps he’ll demand not financial tribute but actual reform of a system that gives patent holders like him the power to disrupt digital life.

If so, it’s a dangerous gambit. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how the patent system could get much worse than it already is.

12:47 pm on June 28, 2010 · bilski (4), law (47), patent (10), scotus (3)

Supreme Court on Bilski – no but whatever..

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The Supreme Court opinion in re:Bilski is in.  With typical ambivalence it upheld the federal court’s decision while rejecting it’s reasoning, replacing the machine-or-transformation test with essentially no test at all. The Court rejected the patent just because it was an “abstract idea”. From the syllabus:

The machine-or-transformation test is not the sole test for patent eligibility under §101. Although that test may be a useful and important clue or investigative tool, it is not the sole test for deciding whether an invention is a patent-eligible “process” under §101. In holding to the contrary, the Federal Circuit violated two principles of statutory interpretation: Courts “‘should not read into the patent laws limitations and conditions which the legislature has not expressed,’” Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U. S. 175, 182, and, “[u]nless otherwise defined, ‘words will be interpreted as taking their ordinary, contemporary, common meaning,’” ibid. The Court is unaware of any ordinary, contemporary, common meaning of “process” that would require it to be tied to a machine or the transformation of an article.
. . .
Because petitioners’ patent application can be rejected under the Court’s precedents on the unpatentability of abstract ideas, the Court need not define further what constitutes a patentable “process,” beyond pointing to the definition of that term provided in §100(b) and looking to the guideposts in Benson, Flook, and Diehr. Nothing in today’s opinion should be read as endorsing the Federal Circuit’s past interpretations of §101.

So this would seem to leave the whole question of software patents as wide open as ever.

Opinion is at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-964.pdf

2:39 am on April 17, 2010 · bilski (4), free culture (25), fsf (3), moglen (2), patent (10)

Film: ‘Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system’

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Last October ISOC-NY webcast a talk by Eben Moglen ‘Patent Law at a Crossroads: Bilski and Beyond‘ concerning an important case before the United States Supreme Court that’s outcome could affect the validity of many software patents. Now a new movie ‘Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system‘ has been produced on the same topic. Watch it below:

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12:35 am on November 25, 2009 · bilski (4), patent (10), webcast (110)

On October 9, 2009, the University of Ri…

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On October 9, 2009, the University of Richmond IPI held its third annual Evil Twin Debate, featuring Professor John Duffy of George Washington University Law School and Professor Jay Thomas of Georgetown Law Center debating “Bilski and Patentable Subject Matter: Method or Madness?”

More information and a link to the video can be found here.