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Archive - March 2008
Patent values under the microscope at Ocean Tomo auction
There may be a few sweaty palms in San Francisco over the next few days. The day after tomorrow, Ocean Tomo is due to hold its spring IP auction in the city and OT staff could be forgiven for feeling slightly nervous as to how it is going to pan out. After significant successive leaps in the amounts generated from patent sales at Ocean Tomo’s US events, the last auction held in Chicago last October was solid rather than spectacular. Interestingly, it was the first ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 31 March 2008 @ 12:00AM
WIPO DG candidates reveal their visions and their plans
There are 15 candidates seeking to become the next Director-General of the World Intellectual Property Organisation. As everyone knows, the present post-holder Kamil Idris is stepping down a year early following sustained criticism of his conduct and, very importantly I hazard, the negotiation of what looks likely to be a very generous compensation package. An EGM of the WIPO Co-ordination Committee is to be held in May in Geneva. At this meeting, a preferred candidate from the 15 ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 31 March 2008 @ 12:00AM
Markets like good IP news, but do they know why?
Positive patent-related news from three companies over the last couple of days has seen their stock prices rise. • On Wednesday shares in Rambus jumped close to 40% on news that the company had won a crucial victory in a long-running dispute with several chip makers, including Micron Technology Inc, which had been arguing that they should not pay royalties to Rambus because patents the company was seeking to enforce were invalid. • Acacia Research Corp, meanwhile, saw ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 28 March 2008 @ 12:00AM
Cybersquatting explosion puts emphasis on trademark owners to demand action
The number of domain name disputes being handled by WIPO under the UDRP is at a record high and the signs are that dramatic annual increases will keep on coming for the foreseeable future. According to a press release issued by WIPO yesterday, its Arbitration and Mediation Centre received over 2,500 complaints about cybersquatting during 2007, up 18% on the 2006 figure and a massive 48% on the figure for 2005. In the cases that were decided, 85% of the time the result was that the ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 27 March 2008 @ 12:00AM
More on the IBM $1 billion patent licensing urban legend
A few days ago I wrote a blog around a note written to me by James Bessen and Michael Meurer about comments I had made concerning their book Patent Failure. Part of their note featured the claim that the frequently recounted tales of IBM making $1 million plus from patent licensing were “an urban legend”. I expressed surprise at this and asked Jim and Michael to come back with further information. Jim has now done so: Does IBM get over $1 billion a year in profits from ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 27 March 2008 @ 12:00AM
A tale of two critics ...
Oh dear, it seems as if I have upset Greg Aharonian, who publishes Internet Patent News, a daily email about patent developments in the US. Aharonian, a long-time critic of just about anything that moves in US patent circles, is particularly upset that I found a reason to praise USPTO director Jon Dudas in a recent blog. Because the News is a daily email only, I can’t provide a link to it, but I can give you a flavour of what it says. “A patent journalist, Joff Wild, has ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 26 March 2008 @ 12:00AM
Microsoft's new business imperative leads to IP rethink
We are going to press on the latest issue of IAM today, so time is a little tight. But I thought I would share with you something about one of the articles that we will be carrying. It is written by Horacio Gutierrez, vice-president and deputy general counsel for IP and licensing at Microsoft. It is about the way in which the company has been reworking its approach to intellectual property over the last seven years. Now, I know that many people would not expect to find the words ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 25 March 2008 @ 12:00AM
Big Blue billion dollar patent licensing revenues "an urban legend"
Following on from my weekend post about their book Patent Failure, authors James Bessen and Michael Meurer have been in touch to counter some of the points I made. This is what they have to say: In his recent blog post, based on a post in the Patently-O blog, Joff Wild asserts that our book, Patent Failure, fails to ask the rights questions, makes implausibly low estimates of patent value, and is "pretty disingenuous" because we (he claims) ignore independent and ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 24 March 2008 @ 12:00AM
Patent economics book fails to answer many vital questions
I have just had a read through the second PatentlyO article written by James Bessen and Michael Meurer based on their book Patent Failure. One thing that caught my eye was the graphs at the bottom, in which the authors attribute global profits derived from patents held by non-pharmaceutical or chemical, publicly-quoted US companies in 1999 to be around $3 billion. It would be interesting to know how they got to such a figure given that one company – IBM – was generating ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 22 March 2008 @ 12:00AM
DSS case shows why EU leaders want one patent jurisdiction, but will patent owners?
Those who may wonder why European governments are spending so much time on trying to establish a single patent jurisdiction for the EU may wish to consider the on-going dispute between Document Security Systems (DSS) and the European Central Bank (ECB). US-based DSS has been seeking to enforce a patent granted by the European Patent Office covering technology that prevents banknotes being forged via digital scanners. The company claims that the ECB which prints Euro bank notes, is ...
Posted by Joff Wild, IAM Magazine on 21 March 2008 @ 12:00AM
