From the category archives:

Intellectual Property

To Protect in China – or not to Protect

February 9, 2011

We’re always being asked whether it is now “worthwhile” filing for patent protection in China or not. “They’ll only just copy our ideas” is the standard response, “and we can’t enforce our patents”. That may have been a reasonable policy ten years ago – but since then the Chinese patent system has progressed tremendously. An [...]

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Protection of Trade Secrets

February 6, 2011

One of the unsung heros of the IP world are trade secrets. They can provide substantial protection to innovators and help to protect and sustain products, as long as the trade secrets are actually kept secret. Unfortunately in the European Union the laws are generally inadequate. There may be provisions – such as in the [...]

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Nanofutures – the future of Nanotechnology IP?

June 16, 2010

It’s been a couple of interesting days in Oviedo, Spain, at the first Nanofutures conference launching the European Technology Integration and Innovation Platform (ETIP) in Nanotechnology. The ETIP is designed to be Europe’s forum for research and commercialisation of nanotech products and the conference was well attended by a number of European Commission officials and [...]

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Ex-Kirkland patent litigation lawyer flips to NPE

June 4, 2010

The ABA Journal is reporting (via Bloomberg) that a former partner at law firm Kirkland and Ellis has purchased 4,500 patents and is starting an NPE (or troll, depending on your attitude towards these things). John Desmarais is a “Billion Dollar Lawyer” (according to Bloomberg) who practiced (what else?) patent litigation. So he’s flipped sides [...]

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Patent Pending

May 1, 2010

Denis Crouch over at the Patently-O blog has done an interesting piece of calculation showing that the average pendency of patents in the USPTO is around 4.1 years for those patents not claiming priority to a US provisional application. Now there’s a number of companies out there who are happy that their patents take a [...]

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Ignoring IP assets when the liquidator comes in…

April 1, 2010

I’m a regular listener to the excellent Planet Money podcast by a team over at NPR that makes economics fun and engaging (or rather more fun and engaging). Catching up today, I listened to their podcast: A Private-Equity Boss In Four-Inch Stilettos about Lynn Tilton, CEO and founder of Patriarch Partners. Patriarch describes itself as: [...]

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Relationship between Patents and Standards – the Dutch Case

March 28, 2010

We reported some months ago on the German case concerning the relationship between patents and standards for recordable CDs. In that case, the German Federal High Court decided that the so-called “FRAND defence” could apply to patents relevant to standards. In other words, it is possible for a company implementing a standard to obtain a [...]

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Paris Court revokes granted European Software Patent

March 21, 2010

One of our interests on Tangible IP is the never ending story of software patents. Just to recap: the European Patent Office is currently considering the degree to which computer-implemented inventions are patentable. On the other side of the Atlantic the US Supreme Court has head arguments in the re Bilski case and we’re waiting [...]

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Facebook’s News Feed Patent

March 1, 2010

There seems to be a bit of panic going on in the blogsphere concerning Facebook’s recently granted US Patent 7,669,123 for providing news feeds. Some commentators seem to feel that Facebook have “monopolised” news feeds and that Twitter and co could be on the receiving end of a patent suit. It’s true that the filing [...]

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Economist Article on IV

February 24, 2010

I see that the Economist online are running an article titled Brilliant Inventor or Patent Troll about Nathan and IV at http://www.economist.com/business-finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15570585 A view. To try to make this simple to understand. To call Nathan or IV a troll is incredibly simplistic. IV has built one of the Worlds most sophisticated businesses and it has the [...]

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