I was just reading the New York Times article by Steve Lohr about how exciting it is that Zoltar Satellite Alarm Systems will be placing their patents up for auction as if a patent auction were some new and exciting forum where valuable patents can be made available for the public to benefit from them. … Read more
Pasted below is a summary version of the article posted on JD Supra on “Black hats and white hats in the patent law system” that I wrote on 8/16/09. Within patent law and the patent litigation system, there are good ways and bad ways to make use of the rules and laws that have been … Read more
It took a few seconds to come up with this analogy, but after reading the “Wear a White Hat” article by Scott Gibson, I couldn’t stop thinking about how relevant the concept of black hat, white hat was not only to archetypes, hackers, and network security professionals, but also to patent practice professionals. In the … Read more
LinkedIn Question by Vagelis Hristidis: Desired Features or Properties of a Patents Search Engine I have been working for a year now on a search engine for patents. Clearly, a key property is the quality of search, that is, discovering the most relevant patents. But are there any other useful features (e.g., automatically email the … Read more
Today in Barron’s, there was an article “RIMM To Pay $267.5 Million To Settle Visto Patent Suit” by Eric Savitz. I’m actually not that sad about this settlement. If Visto’s patents genuinely covered the technology used by RIM, then they had a duty to license their technology and not to steal it. Without delving deeper … Read more
It just occurred to me that social networking sites are about to become fewer in the coming months. There is an article in the Jewelry BlogStore Blog, “Facebook Huddles with Patent Vampire” referring to talks between Nathan Myhrvold from Intellectual Ventures, and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of facebook.com. In the article, it shows the two … Read more
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