All about 01
...This is, in part, an article in the G 'n M this weekend that 'fits the bill' for our 01. I have the 2nd page cause I thought it to be more informative and relevant than the first in regards to 01. The title is 'Why big tech companies are buying up patents" or to that affect. Maybe someone with more tech savvy can provide an all in ONE reading.
...have a good 01
...g-g
Additionally, judges and juries in technology patent cases are often not technically inclined. “It’s not trivial to understand what a patent covers,” says Florian Mueller, a prominent patent expert and blogger. “The closest thing to a patent expert on the jury might be a grade-school teacher, but that jury will determine if a patent is valid and how much you’ll have to pay.”
The difficulties begin well before any parties see the inside of a courtroom. The first hurdle is simply identifying if, and by whom, a patent has been infringed. Whereas pharmaceutical industry patents, for instance, tend to use consistent and easy-to-search terminology, technology patent keywords can be as vague as “object” or “network.” And while a pharmaceutical product may potentially infringe on one or two existing patents, a single piece of hardware or software could infringe on hundreds.
“It’s complicated because the question in many of these cases is whether this patent that was issued 10 years ago, and it may have been a valid patent ... applies to an app on an iPhone today,” said Edward Naughton, a lawyer representing several app developers who recently received licensing demands from Lodsys.
The U.S. patent industry was on the verge of cataclysmic change earlier this year, thanks to a case that Canadian software firm i4i filed against Microsoft. The case alleged that a piece of code in Microsoft’s Word product infringed on i4i technology.
Microsoft took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, losing every decision along the way. Microsoft argued before the top court that it should be easier to have a patent declared invalid – something that would have had profound impact on the entire technology industry, had the Supreme Court not shot it down.
The software giant argued that the high standard required for invalidating a patent would stifle innovation, i4i argued that weakening that standard would do the exact same thing. In legal filings, many large technology companies sided with Microsoft, while many venture capital firms – which invest predominantly in small technology start-ups – sided with i4i.
Even though the Supreme Court decided to maintain the status quo, the argument over patent reform has become increasingly more high-profile (thanks in large part to frequent criticism of the current system by Google, a company that holds far fewer patents than many of its competitors). U.S. Congress has stepped into the fray, considering possible options for improving the system.
But unless there’s a major change in the system, it is likely the world’s biggest technology companies will continue to write billion-dollar cheques in order to stock up on as many patents as they can, if only to avoid the massive ongoing court costs. According to a recent prospectus filed by patent company RPX Corp., there were some 40,000 defendants named in U.S. patent infringement cases between 2005 and 2010, with total litigation costs in the tens of billions of dollars.
“That’s a big debate that’s under way in the legal and tech communities [as to how to fix the patent system],” says Mr. Naughton. “And it’s not an easy question.”