Gene Quinn & Steve Brachmann

The majority shareholder of The Economist Group, the company responsible for publication of The Economist, owns patents. It seems very odd to us that most of the shareholder capital going into a publication that decries patents is coming from organizations who aggressively protect their own innovations through patents. This latest Economist episode has to raise an eyebrow, particularly as the U.S. Congress is soon set to return from the long August recess. Was this Economist article planted with the express purpose of breathing life into what is an increasingly lifeless push for additional patent reform?

In June, authorities in France served a formal notice to Google that it must delete certain links from it’s Google.com domain on a legal basis known as ‘the right to be forgotten.’ The right to be forgotten is implicated when an individual contacts a search engine company, such as Google, asking for a search result to be de-listed, essentially taking it out of their available search results. The provider assesses whether the privacy issue at stake has enough merit to de-list the link. If they don’t, the individual then has another avenue to take with a regulatory agency which may overturn the search engine provider’s decision.

Issa’s amendment changes the language so that a party bringing a patent infringement suit where the defendant has its principle place of business, where the defendant has a physical presence, or where the patent owner has a meaningful physical presence due to research and development or manufacturing. At first glance these venue provisions seem reasonable because they would curtail the extreme forum shopping that does go on in patent cases, as witnessed in the Eastern District of Texas. On closer consideration, however, this provision could create problems for those patent owners who are not bad actors that seek to abuse the system or take advantage by only filing in favorable, remote forums.

At the end of a three-hour long hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary this Thursday, June 4th, S.1137, the proposed legislation known as the PATENT Act, was approved to move to the floor of the United States Senate by a 16-4 vote of the Senate committee. Proponents of the bill lauded the bipartisan support which brought the bill committee approval. Interestingly, a small but vocal bipartisan minority has developed, a couple of whom have pledged to continue debate aspects of this legislation which they fear will pose a threat to American innovation.

Is Uber really a technology company? Essentially, Uber runs a car service and at first glance the company is no more a technology company than any other company that happens to have an app, such as your local grocery store. But as you dig deeper you start to see that Uber’s value is not in running a car service, but rather in mining all kinds of data from the devices of those using its service. In fact, Uber’s privacy policy, which governs the information users allow them to collect from their devices, is substantially longer than the document labeled “terms of service.”

Given the collective bias of the witness panel, it is hardly surprising that on the issue of the PATENT Act there was a clear, positive consensus in the witness panel. But there is no such consensus within the industry and those voices were brought to the table by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Chris Coons (D-DE), two of the sponsors of the STRONG Patents Act that has been debated in Senate committee as recently as March. Durbin, who pointed out that “this panel is divided between people who love the bill and people who really love the bill,” read part of a strongly worded letter submitted by the National Venture Capital Association who is worried that the PATENT Act, as worded currently, could hurt investment.

If patents are so bad and Google has to spend so much money lobbying to weaken the patent system, why is the company simultaneously buying patents and racing to quickly patent their own original innovation? There seems to be a disconnect between what Google says and what they do. Could it be possible that Google has taken such strong anti-patent positions in an attempt to drive down the market for software patents so they can continue to collect patents at steep discount? That would be quite troubling, but there is no question that as Google rhetoric against the patent system has increased so to has their taste for patents

Google has recently received a patent on a method of giving a robot a personality, and in the Summary of the Invention the company explains: ”The robot may be programmed to take on the personality of real-world people (e.g., behave based on the user, a deceased loved one, a celebrity and so on) so as to take on character traits of people to be emulated by a robot” Thus, the claims on the Internet that Google has created a robot that takes on the personality of a deceased loved one, seem grounded in fact, which itself is a little surprising.