This Saturday, September 15, 2017, marks the five-year anniversary of the first filing of an inter partes review. We’ve seen nearly 7,000 post-grant reviews filed since then, a Supreme Court…
Read more →Patent examiners have an extremely hard job. They’re given a patent application—which could be anywhere from a page long up to hundreds of pages, with patent claims ranging from a…
Read more →The Chamber of Commerce produces a yearly ranking of intellectual property systems around the world. This year, they dropped the U.S. patent system to 12th. If I thought their rankings…
Read more →The cost of bad patents is not just the cost of lawsuits. This may seem obvious, but apparently it isn’t. I’ve recently noticed a trend from the anti-reform lobby:…
Read more →Reports emerged today that Huawei has demanded over $1 billion in patent license payments from Verizon for its cellular network patents.
As I wrote in April, Huawei has the potential to abuse its strong position in cellular network patents. As required by international agreements, the U.S. patent system doesn’t discriminate between domestic and foreign patent holders, meaning that anything a U.S. patent holder can do, a foreign holder—like Huawei—is equally permitted to do.
This week marks the start of three separate hearings on a fundamentally flawed draft § 101 bill. Fortunately, it’s only a draft bill, and there’s still time for it to be modified to make it less harmful. Unfortunately, based on the announced witness list for the first hearing, that might not happen.
Remember Shipping and Transit? The notorious NPE went bankrupt last year after its campaign against everyone from transit app developers to city transit authorities hit a few potholes. Following a decade-long licensing and litigation campaign leveraging the high cost of patent litigation, including one year in which it filed more patent suits than anyone else,…
Today, staff from Senators Tillis and Coons will sit in a room with a group of stakeholders—primarily patent lawyers and lawyers from the pharmaceutical industry—and discuss their recently released draft for a § 101 bill. That draft bill reflects little of the careful input that has been provided to the Senators over the course of the…
Late yesterday evening, Judge Koh issued her anxiously-awaited ruling in the FTC v. Qualcomm litigation. The 233-page opinion extensively describes Qualcomm’s anti-competitive conduct, how it has harmed both existing and potential competitors as well as consumers, and how that conduct has ultimately harmed competition in the LTE and 5G markets. It would normally be hard…
