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Archive - September 2009
Skype woes help to prove the CIPO case
For proponents of a dedicated CIPO role inside large corporaitons, the on-going Skype saga - which this blog has previously covered here and here - is rapidly turning into a great argument-winner. As I see it, the CIPO role is one which gives a single individual the ultimate responsibility for all areas of IP inside an organisation - from strategic development and prosecution, through to litigation, exploitation and value creation. An essential part of the job is ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 29 September 2009 @ 12:19PM
Germany's Pirate Party to secure state funding after general election success
Germany's Pirate Party, which scored 0.9% of the vote in the recent European elections, has more than doubled its support in the space of three months. In the national German elections, which took place yesterday, the pirates obtained a 2% share. That is the equivalent to 900,000 votes. Although the party has not achieved the 5% necessary to get representation in parliament, it will now qualify for state funding. Combine this with the fact that its ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 28 September 2009 @ 6:16AM
A czar is born
Victoria Espinel has been nominated to be the US's first ever Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. The new IP czar is mandated by the controversial Pro-IP Act, which was signed into law by George Bush last year, to “report directly to the president and Congress regarding domestic international intellectual property enforcement programs”. My understanding of that is that Espinel will have the task of ensuring that IP enforcement issues and ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 27 September 2009 @ 7:23AM
It is time to tackle Europe's patent attorney deficit
The European Union currently has a population of just about bang on 500 million. These people live in 27 member states. Within these member states, there are over 20 million businesses. Big numbers, I am sure you will agree. Now one of the stated aims of the European Union is to be the centre of the world's knowledge economy. That means creating and nurturing the innovative skills of the 500 million so that we can grow the 20 million. This should lead to more jobs, greater ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 24 September 2009 @ 6:13PM
Troll tracker case settles, but it should never have got to this
The Prior Art blog reports that the defamation action against Cisco Systems and Rick Frenkel, author of the Patent Troll Tracker blog, has been settled just prior to a jury in the Eastern District of Texas was due to retire to consider a verdict. The case was brought by lawyer Eric Albritton, who has represented a number of NPEs/trolls in the Eastern District. He claimed that Frenkel had libelled him in pieces posted on the Troll Tracker blog. At the time Frenkel was employed by Cisco ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 23 September 2009 @ 1:21PM
Google comes out on top in first round of key European AdWords court case
The advocate general of the European Court of Justice today gave his backing to Google's controversial AdWords system, which allows advertisers to purchase third-party trademarks as keywords to trigger sponsored links in search results. This is how events are being reported by IAM's sister publicaiton, World Trademark Review: The advocate general of Europe's highest court, Luís Miguel Poiares Pessoa Maduro, today gave his backing to Google's controversial ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 22 September 2009 @ 2:54PM
The New York Times hones in on the market for patents
You are not going to find anything much that's new to you in this New York Times article about the growing IP intermediary market (except, perhaps, that the full name of RPX Corp is Rational Patent Exchange - I didn't know that anyway). What is significant, though, is that it is a front page story in the newspaper's business section. If that is not progress, I do not know what is. An added bonus is that there do not seem to be any obvious howlers in the piece. It is ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 21 September 2009 @ 5:51PM
UK IP minister hopeful of "significant progress" on Community patent and court
Something else to look out for in the next issue of IAM is an exclusive interview we have with the UK's intellectual property minister David Lammy. One of the quesitons he anwers is about progress on the negotiations surrounding the Community patent and patent court. This is what he says: I wouldn’t want to make rash predictions of possible outcomes but I hope we’ll soon be able to report significant progress in both cases. I recently met my Swedish counterpart, the ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 21 September 2009 @ 3:04PM
It's time for the IP fightback to begin, says LESI president
In the next IAM, which goes to the printers this Wednesday, we are running a letter from Adam Liberman, the current president of LES International. He got in touch with us on the back of the Broken Brand story we ran in the last issue of the magazine, which dealt with the negatve perceptions that IP so often creates within the business world, the political class and among the general public. Liberman acknowledges that there is a serious problem and makes a few ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 20 September 2009 @ 8:08AM
Skype deal hit by further law suits as IP bites back
If like me you thought that the recent offer made to eBay by a consortium of private equity firms signalled an end to the IP dispute that has recently engulfed Skype, you had probably better think again. A suit filed on Wednesday in the District Court of Northrn California by Joltid, a company owned by Skype's original developers Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, claims that both eBay and the would-be purchasers are infringing Joltid copyrights relating to software ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 18 September 2009 @ 7:23PM
