A heavy heart....
Oh dear, oh dear. The NY Times reports overnight that those lovely trolls at NTP are back with a vengeance and on a new parasitic crusade to extort monopoly rent from the smartphone market. http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/smartphone-patent-suits-challenge-big-makers/
As any reader of this blog will know from recent posts I’m no lover of this sort of activity. As ever the parasitic troll latches itself onto the larger more successful players in the market. Ron Epstein tries to sound like the credible defender of the little guy “these people are going to have to deal with our patents”. Oh dear, how boring is this all sounding!! Why don’t you just take your $612.5m and go and do something worthwhile with it, like feeding a few starving children or sponsoring a few wells in African villages?
I had heard at IPBC that NTP’s patents had been largely wiped out in re-examination (can’t recall who said that?) but it seems not and enough of their key claims are still standing to allow them to issue a whole bunch of new threats. You know who I feel sorry for in this situation, poor Apple, who, as now the world’s most influential (back off from most successful but it’s arguable) gets more than its fair share of parasites. And all because they have the World’s most sexy, most popular and most in demand products.
I also met with Eran Zur and Thomas Westerlund from RPX at IPBC. I can’t quite recall if Apple is on their member list but I’d like to see the poacher turned gamekeeper approach to NTP and how successful this might be. Expect to see or hear rumours of visits to NTP by RPX. From meeting Eran and from market rumours it is said that he’s one of the world’s best negotiators. This could actually turn out to be fun.
Unfortunately however it’s all a lot of a sideshow and damages the credibility of IP as a brand and its ability to crawl into being viewed as an asset class. Joren and I are writing this month in IAM Magazine on the subject of “Copyright as the orphan IP right” (well he’s writing it, I’m credited for a few small but pointed contributions) and it is fascinating to contrast how innovation in and around the copyright world contrasts with that in the patent world.
Too many current and ex-lawyers in and around patents I’m afraid. What was the old lawyer joke? Actually there are tons but this one is pretty apposite—
A physician, an engineer and a lawyer were arguing about whose profession was the oldest.
The surgeon announced, “Remember how God removed a rib from Adam to create Eve? Obviously, medicine is the oldest profession.”
The engineer replied, “But before that, God created the heavens and the earth from chaos, in less than a week. You have to admit that was a remarkable feat of engineering, and that makes engineering an older profession than medicine.”
The lawyer smirked, and said, “Who do you think created the chaos?”
Ha ha…very totally unfunny. Can somebody with a tiny degree of credibility sort these crazy kids out before they wreck the house for good?
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Andrew,
I wasn’t at the IPBC so can’t be sure. I think folks from ArticleOne Partners generally hold the view that NTP patents were invalidated during reexamination. They even use the RIM vs NTP example to make the point that invalidating art can be found and thereby value of patents (like those of NTP’s) could be reduced to zero. Correct point, but wrong example, apparently.
Regards,
Rahul
I’ll look back over my notes–maybe it was in the NPE session? I’m thinking it was Dan McCurdy from AST but I can’t be sure. Either way it seems you’re right-NTP and its patents are very much alive and equally very much kicking. Intriguing in the article in the NYT is that Nokia has already taken a license apparently..wonder when that was? Double interesting is that the article views IV as one of the answers to the NPE problem–not quite the viewpoint from inside the IP community.