From the category archives:

Patent

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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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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Photovoltaic Solar Cells – Patents in Europe

January 6, 2010

There’s an interesting news report over at EE Times Asia on the patent side of photovoltaic panels. Citing a report by Canadian company Semiconductor Insights EE Times notes. The report is US-centric and so I took the opportunity to see if there was any special European angles.  Germany has been very much in the lead [...]

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Nokia and Apple

October 25, 2009

I noticed that Nokia has lost patience with Apple and decided to bring licensing discussions to a head by issuing proceedings. Poor Apple, like RIM, was late into the 2 and 3G Standards game and the incumbents (Nokia, Ericsson and Qualcomm for 3G) are so embedded in the setting of Standards (and by the way [...]

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IP ownership issues not just for Skype and eBay

August 27, 2009

The recent Skype / eBay story around ownership flags up all sorts of things in what we see in our line of work around IP strategy: IP ownership issues as a rule are always present, and can be very, very costly to fix (but very cheap to fix if caught early). A short Timeline 2001 [...]

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W3C investigating Apple’s patent

June 24, 2009

There’s a rather interesting report on the UK ZDNet website about Apple’s refusal to licence royalty-free a patent for use in a proposed web standard. US Patent No 5,764,992 relates to a method for automatically updating software programs on a computer. Web standards are set up by the World Wide Web Consortium. Their website states [...]

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