If you’re an innovation buff, and I am, the Internet of Things is thrilling. That is, when it’s not a little creepy.
If you’re a football fan (and I am), learning that this season in the National Football League, worn sensors will connect players’ movements on the field to a computer for the purpose of data analysis seems kind of fun—although, outside the sports arena and taken to an extreme, this type of tracking could get really creepy. (More on that in a minute.)
ABC’s Shark Tank has become my favorite show. I guess you could have predicted that. Every Friday night, my girls and I settle down on the couch to get our fix. Bring on the munchies!
Did anyone catch last week’s episode (EP605), apparently a rerun from 17 October 2014? In the first presentation, the contestants presented an inner-tube with metal bars in the middle to support safe jumping. Called the Jungle Jumparoo.
IBM is leading the pack in developing cloud patents, according to a recent piece in Computerworld. But is the outlook sunny?
IBM is touting its fat IP portfolio, indeed. That’s (count ‘em) 7,534 patents in 2014 alone. Microsoft won 2,829 in the same period, Amazon 745. But IBM is getting flattened in the market right now, after being a market darling between about 2004 and 2011 or so.
It’s about time. Another voice in the innovation community has risen to counter the repetitive arguments of those favoring legislation to curb the purportedly diabolical actions of patent trolls. I’m looking forward to hearing more such voices.
Bob Pavey, Silicon Valley icon and partner emeritus at venture capital firm Morgenthaler Ventures, isn’t buying the rhetoric. Check out his sober opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News on the march toward passing H.R.9, the “anti-troll” bill now out of committee and to be debated on the floor of the House of Representatives.
According to the World Bank, gross domestic product in the U.S. was almost $16.8 trillion in 2013.
As it prepares to launch its new “quality initiative,” the USPTO claims that IP-intensive industries “support at least 40 million jobs in the U.S. and contribute more than $5 trillion—or nearly 35 percent—to our GDP.”
Intellectual Asset Management is today reporting on its blog on subjects near and dear to all of us: IP value, software patents in our “tricky” new era, legislation that could affect litigation, the environment post-Alice, and more.
Most interesting to me were the reports from Joff Wild, including on what Rockstar Consortium’s John Veschi said about software patents at SCOTUS:
Floyd Norris writes a worthwhile business column for The New York Times. He’s done yeoman work exposing corporate fraud, for one thing.
Norris’ article of October of 2013, “Extracting a Toll From a Patent ‘Troll’,” offers a good and detailed summary (as good as it gets in mainstream media) of the issues at stake in Octane, now up for Supreme Court review.
In her article on Huffington Post, “The Forward-Thinking, Future-Shaping Federal Circuit,” employment attorney and Wake Forest University law professor Abigail Perdue addresses the unique nature of the Court (where she also clerked for Judge Jimmie A. Reyna):
[T]he Federal Circuit is the only circuit where every judge resides in the same location, generating an unparalleled culture of collegiality and collaboration. It is also the only circuit with nationwide jurisdiction, so its opinions control across America and are not geographically limited like other circuits’ decisions.
Really? No underlying facts at all? Never? Is anyone else surprised about the outcome of Lighting Ballast?
I am. I thought there would be some—though maybe negligible—situation where the district court was forced to rely on extrinsic evidence, such as expert testimony. And the district court’s decision with respect to that evidence would be reviewed for clear error.
Remember your Mom saying “imitation is the greatest form of flattery”? And thinking as a kid … “Right, Mom.” I do remember, and now I find opportunity to say it to my girls.
But what’s the proper way to imitate something that you like? From a legal perspective, we know to avoid other companies’ intellectual property. We strategize about ways to “design around,” to avoid infringing others’ IP. But can we legitimately imitate?
