Possible good motives of the supertroll patent conglomerates.

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It’s assumed in the blogworld that IV is evil and that Nathan M. is public troll #1. I keep wondering in the back of my mind, what if he is up to good rather than no good. Everybody agrees that there are serious kinks in the patent laws and that the USPTO is backlogged until … Read more

Not always so clear when a patent acquisition company has gone troll.

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Recently when I’ve searched for “Intellectual Ventures” on the Twitter web site, all I’ve been seeing are comments about how they hit up a big company for a large sum of money over a license based on a number of patents they owned (a.k.a. purchased). The opinion, as described in the “Microsoft Wants to ‘Save’ … Read more

Future Issue: PATENT TYING.

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Thinking about the possible future issues with regard to larger companies entering the “patent pooling” / patent enforcing business model, I believe a future issue might be the concept of “tying,” (a concept I learned about during my time in China) where a company is approached to take a license for patents relating to one … Read more

Solicitor General’s patent infringement suit against California.

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Solicitor General patent infringement suit against an aggressive State of California hiding behind 11th Amendment. I was reading this morning’s post on the Patently-O Patent Law Blog about the Biomedical Patent Management Corp. (BPMC) v. California Department of Health Services (on petition for certiorari) brief by the Solicitor General. In short, I feel that the … Read more

Ethics and morality, too little enforcement and too much regulation.

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I was thinking about Zusha Elinson’s “New Business Targeting Patent Trolls Signs IBM and Cisco” article in which he discusses how RPX Corp appears to have the business model of aggregating patent assets (likely relevant to their members) “off the street” so that patent trolls cannot get to the assets first and enforce them against … Read more

Ocean Tomo and patent valuation methods.

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There was an informative article on Phillip Brooks’ Patent Infringement Updates web site where a user inquired about valuation methods and Ocean Tomo, an auction house for patent transactions. My comment to that article is below. Ocean Tomo appears to be the next step in moving patents from A) being property that can be sold … Read more

“Patenting Past” innovation.

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As I was writing this comment (below) to the “New patent aggregator RPX may have an Oedipal complex” article by Matt Asay, I got chills down my back. You know I’m all for business and profits, but I am also for innovation and the furtherance of technology. If for no other reason, I got into … Read more

Loosely using the term “patent troll.”

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Another article appeared discussing patent trolls. The article is called, “Looking to fend off patent trolls, IBM, Cisco support startup RPX” by John Cook. It appears I have a crusade here to properly define the issue of patent trolls for the patent community. My comment is below. “Look, you are throwing around the term “patent … Read more

Maybe the issue is allowing patents to be TRANSFERRABLE PROPERTY.

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A paste of a comment from another TechDirt article on “New Patent Buying Firm Swears It’ll Never Litigate Over Its Patents” Comment – Nov 25th, 2008 @ 1:27pm I agree. The goal of the whole patent process is to INNOVATE and to protect the INVENTOR against others reverse engineering and copying his/her ideas. Perhaps the … Read more

A Patent Conglomerate, a.k.a. “Mafia”

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Another paste of a comment from the TechDirt article on “New Patent Buying Firm Swears It’ll Never Litigate Over Its Patents” Re: Mafia – Nov 25th, 2008 @ 1:29pm There is no reason that those looking for patent protection have to pay the equivalent of a mafia in order to have protection from would-be infringers. … Read more