Microsoft, Motorola submit final arguments to Washington court on the relevance and effects of Google-MPEG LA AVC/H.264 agreement to a Microsoft-Motorola RAND license
Essential Patent Blog
March 4, 2013
A couple of weeks ago, we noted a peculiar minute order emanating from Judge James L. Robart’s courtroom in the Microsoft-Motorola RANDReasonable and Non-Discriminatory. See FRAND. case. Based on his review of Google’s AVC/H.264 standard-essential patent pool license agreement with MPEG LA, Judge Robart asked the parties to submit short letter briefs addressing two questions regarding the relevance of the Enterprise License provision (Section 3.1.7) to any grantback license that Motorola (as a subsidiary of Google) might owe to Microsoft.
President Obama targets patent trolls
San Francisco Chronicle
March 3, 2013
Lois Kazakoff
Patent trolls are such a scourge to the tech business that no one less than President Obama went after them last week. “They don’t actually produce anything themselves,” the president said. “They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”
Death to patent trolls
The Atlantic
March 1, 2013
Jordan Weissmann
It’s hard to think of any business more inherently obnoxious than a patent trollAn entity in the business of being infringed — by analogy to the mythological troll that exacted payments from the unwary. Cf. NPE, PAE, PME. See Reitzig and Henkel, Patent Trolls, the Sustainability of ‘Locking-in-to-Extort’ Strategies, and Implications for Innovating Firms.. These are the tech-world parasites that buy up troves of intellectual property, not so that they can make a product, but so that they can turn around and sue successful companies for patent infringement with the aim of nabbing a quick and profitable settlement. They’ve infested the courts over the last decade, and by one count are now responsible for more than half of all U.S. patent cases, potentially costing American businesses some $29 billion a year.