Last week, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Google v. Oracle, preparing to review the Federal Circuit’s decision that application programming interfaces (APIs) are copyrightable and that the replication of an API to implement compatibility is not a fair use. There are numerous legal flaws with the Federal Circuit’s decisions, flaws addressed at length in…
Blog Posts
Guest Post: Is Big Tech FRANDly to Competition?
by Charles Duan •
Charles Duan is the Director of Technology and Innovation Policy at the R Street Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. This post is cross-posted at the Disruptive Competition Project. On Tuesday, Apple released a new policy on its website relating to the obscure topic of “FRAND” licensing of patents. That’s an…
Supreme Court Hears Oral Argument in Copyright Sovereign Immunity Case
by Josh Landau •
This post, from guest author Jonathan Band, first appeared on the Disruptive Competition Project. While the case addresses sovereign immunity with respect to copyright claims, it directly implicates the Florida Prepaid decision which applied sovereign immunity to states who infringe patents. Later cases interpreted Florida Prepaid to bar actions by defendants seeking to invalidate state…
Senate Hearing on Patent Quality Today
by Josh Landau •
Later today, the Senate will hold a hearing on how Congress can help prevent the issuance of poor quality patents. I recently testified at a hearing on the STRONGER Patents Act and patent quality was one of the topics discussed. In fact, in my responses to questions for the record from Sen. Tillis, I addressed…
Voting Machines, Patents, and National Security
by Josh Landau •
When standard-essential patents (SEPs) are in the news, it’s usually in the context of cellular or wireless networking standards. Maybe you’ve thought about how standards govern other things, ranging from audio-visual encoding standards like MP3 to threads on fire hydrants. But what you probably don’t think about are voting machine standards.
New E.D. Texas Ruling Is Vicarious Victory for Trolls
by Josh Landau •
In a decision issued last week, Judge Gilstrap—the “poster boy” for patent trolls’ favorite court, the Eastern District of Texas—has mangled the law on induced infringement, contributory infringement, and willfulness. The ruling in Motiva v. Sony & HTC contradicts case law and the logic of the statute, cites case law for a proposition it explicitly…
Mythical Troll Attacks GNOME
by Josh Landau •
It’s become a bit of shibboleth among the folks who want to roll back the patent reforms of the past decade that patent trolls are a myth. Unfortunately, this week one of those mythical trolls is taking a very real swing at a little GNOME.
The Law of the Patent Instrument
by Josh Landau •
Patents are a useful tool in innovation policy—but they aren’t the only tool available. If all you ever see are patents (and patent lawyers), your natural reaction is to use patents to solve policy problems. It’s a normal human bias—the law of the instrument states that humans will reach for a familiar tool (i.e., patents)…
Curver v. Home Expressions Advances Design Patent Law
by Josh Landau •
In today’s Curver v. Home Expressions decision, the Federal Circuit resolved several outstanding questions regarding design patents. In particular, the Federal Circuit rejected the notion that a design can be claimed, untethered from a specific article of manufacture to which it is applied. It also rejected the notion that the verbal portion of a design…
Nartron IPRs a Touchstone For Understanding PTAB Discretion
by Josh Landau •
The PTAB’s recent institution decisions in petitions filed against US5,796,183, a touchscreen patent owned by Nartron, are useful in understanding how the PTAB can be expected to address other situations with multiple simultaneous petitions, especially when a later petitioner may be able to benefit from a decision on an earlier petition.