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Inside Article One
Earlier this week I spoke to Cheryl Milone, the founder and CEO of Article One, the patent validation business. I have reported on the company a couple of times on this blog, most recently when Marshall Phelps became a director, and it was an opportunity to find out a bit more about what it does. In a nutshell, the Article One proposition is that it can call up a worldwide community of advisers to assess the strength of a particular patent and to see whether there is any material ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 19 March 2010
Defensive patent aggregator faces US legal action over alleged troll-style behaviour
Limelight, a company that provides internet content delivery services, has filed a request for a declaratory judgment in a US federal court in Arizona against Allied Security Trust (AST), the defensive patent aggregation organisation. The CEO of AST is Dan McCurdy, who is also the chairman and founder of the anti-NPE/troll database service PatentFreedom. Last September in Gothenburg, I heard McCurdy deliver a very strident speech in which he roundly ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 17 March 2010
Will Nortel become a patent licensing company?
This blog has been keeping an eye on events relating to the Nortel bankruptcy for a while now. A recent article on the TelecomTV website sheds a little more light as decision day looms on what to do with the company's patent portfolio. Interestingly, a senior executive of one of the companies charged with going through the collection believes there may not be a sale. "I think there’s an equally likely chance or at least a significant chance that they will not part with ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 16 March 2010
Brazil lists potential IP targets in trade war with US
If there is going to be a compromise in the US/Brazil trade war, in which American IP owners are on the frontline, it looks like it is only going to happen at the very last minute. To ratchet up the pressure on the Obama administration over the dispute concerning subsidies paid to US cotton producers, the Brazilians yesterday published a list of IP rights that could be subjected to sanctions in as little as three weeks time. According to Brazil's Official Gazette ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 16 March 2010
International work-sharing is key to tackling quality and backlog problems, says Kappos
USPTO Director David Kappos was in London for a flying visit last week to attend the launch of a new publication that reports on the economic damage being done by the global patent backlog, as well as to announce a major work sharing initiative with the UK IP Office. While he was over here I had the chance to sit down with him to talk through some of the major issues he is currently grappling with. The first thing to say is that Kappos's mandate to deal with the myriad problems the ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 14 March 2010
Another big name US IP boutique bites the dust
The venerable American IP law firm Darby & Darby has confirmed that it is in the process of dissolving. When it ceases to trade it will follow those other once seemingly impregnable New York boutiques Pennie & Edmonds, Morgan & Finnegan and Fish & Neave into oblivion. I became editor of Managing Intellectual Property in 1994 and how things have changed in the States since then. While a number of the big boutiques do still seem to be going strong - the likes ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 13 March 2010
Patent quality and quantity rankings show significant differences
Intellectual Property Today has published a list of what it describes as the "2010 Top Patent Firms" in the US. It is based on the number of US patents obtained for clients in 2009. In the latest issue of IAM, published at the beginning of February, we did a ranking of US law firms based on the quality of patents they obtain for their clients. Of course, quantity is easy to measure - you just look at the record and count. Quality is always going to be subjective and so ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 12 March 2010
New report reveals IV's Ocean Tomo auction buying spree
Avancept LLP has published a new report entitled Publicly Auctioned Patent Buyers: Intellectual Ventures & Others. This seeks to identify the organisations that bought patents at te publicly-held Open Tomo auctions that took place between 2006 and 2009, up to - and I think - including the last one that occurred before the OT auction business was sold to ICAP. It covers the 300 lots that were sold at the groundbreaking events which, on occasions, generated a great deal of money. It ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 11 March 2010
Brazil close to declaring war on US IP
At some stage, possibly quite soon, some US patent owners could get very angry with both their own government and the government of Brazil. Yesterday the latter stated that as part of a trade dispute with the US over subsidies to American cotton producers, it may bust patents to the value of $238 million as part of overall sanctions worth close to $830 million. In other words, entirely innocent US patent owners in Brazil stand to lose significant amounts of revenue as ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 09 March 2010
There is more IP litigation in China than anywhere else on earth
The statistics coming out of China get more and more astounding. The Supreme People's Court has announced that in 2009 30,626 civil IP cases were filed. That's up over 25% on the 2008 figure. What's more, last year the courts decided 30,509 cases, a rise of nearly 30%. I have not yet seen any figures for IP cases in the US for 2009, but I would be surprised if the number came anywhere close to what is being reported for China. That said, PWC recently reported that in 2008 2,896 patent ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 08 March 2010
