1. Patent infringement filings take a nosedive
A review of Stanford’s IP Litigation Clearinghouse revealed a sharp decline in patent infringement filings in 2008.
According to this National Law Journal article, new infringement suits fell by 8% in 2008 as compared to 2007. The last five months of the year saw a 23% decrease over the same period in 2007.
The cause for the drop?
“Several patent litigators attributed the decrease to clients clamping down on legal costs associated with some patent cases, which tend to be more costly than standard lawsuits. But other factors could have contributed to the decline, including a general shift from federal district court to filing patent cases before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), as well as longer times to trial in some of the nation’s traditionally busiest districts, the Central District of California and the Eastern District of Texas.”
Hmmm…something tells me they they missed one – the new found difficulty in hearing the words “valid and infringed.”
2. Adam Smith – (patent) Lessons from the Depression
Bruce MacEwen expands on the McKinsey Quarterly’s Innovation Lessons from the 1930s.
The McKinsey subtitle – “History suggests that even the deepest downturns can create huge opportunities for companies with money and ideas.”
Bruce adds: “Not only may your competitors be battening down the hatches, but investment assets (talent, primarily) may be cheaper than they have been for a long time.”
3. TechDirt – The cultural gulf between lawyers and technologists on patent law
The author notes his observations on the differing views between patent attorneys and technologists on patent law, following last week’s Brookings Institution conference on “The Limits of Abstract Patents in an Intangible Economy.”
“I was struck by the dramatic differences between the views of lawyers on the one hand (who made up the majority of the panelists and audience members) and the handful of technologists on the other….[P]atent attorneys and law professors who write about patent law are overwhelmingly in favor of patents on software, and prefer to argue about how to fine-tune patent law to get fewer “bad” software patents without invalidating the “good” ones. In contrast, a lot of computer programmers simply wish the patent system would leave them alone.”
…
“As a consequence, the two communities have radically different views of how well the patent system is working. The lawyers certainly acknowledge that there’s a problem, but they seem to find it incomprehensible that there could be a major American industry that’s better off without patent protections. Techies understand that patents are not an important part of the software industry, and so they’re much more likely to say that their industry would be better off without them.”
Last week’s report from IFI on the top us patent recipients generated a lot of buzz for its observation that “the scales of patent-quantity supremacy may be shifting away from corporate America in favor of companies overseas, especially to those in Asia.”
The cause for the shift? Foreign companies garnered 51% of new patents in 2008, meaning American companies grabbed less than half.
This BusinessWeek article suspects there’s more to it than just numbers, though:
The problem with the Japanese system is that it emphasizes quantity over quality. Figuring out a patent’s value can be tricky because it can take years to turn a good idea into a winning product. So the solution in Japan has been simply to give a bonus for every little incremental invention. And why submit one solid patent when you can get more money for filing five? The result: There’s more of an incentive to file a lot of patents than to come up with one that’s hard for rivals to copy (plus a few tweaks to discourage a court battle).
If American companies continue to react to recent caselaw pressures by focusing on quality over quantity, it seems likely that this “shift” is likely to continue.
5. The Obama administration immediately adopts a wide-open robots.txt file
On Tuesday, President Obama sent a swift technological signal that he’s serious when saying “transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” What did he do? The new whitehouse.gov website seemed to appear even as Chief Justice Roberts and then-(President? Senator?) Obama were wrestling with the oath, and with it came a brand new, wide-open, 2-line permissive robots.txt file that invites search engine bots everywhere to enter the site, and crawl and index everything (save one directory). The new file replaced a 2400-line restrictive robots.txt file used by the Bush administration.
In the patent world, this sends an immediate signal to the PTO, which currently uses the restrictive style on servers housing BPAI decisions.
BTW, I liked this find so much, I wrote a full post about it.
This find came to me from @gahlord via @nipper on Twitter.
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Tags: litigation, most interesting, software, USPTO, uspto.gov