Posts Tagged: "Google"

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the California-based nonprofit public-benefit organization with authority over the global Internet’s system of unique identifiers, e.g. IP addresses and domain names, known as generic top-level domains (gTLDs). ICANN’s New gTLD Program has seen the addition of more than 1,200 top-level domains to the Internet’s Domain Name System.  Each new gTLD is contractually obligated to provide a set of trademark Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs), including mainly the Trademark Claims Service, Sunrise, and the Uniform Rapid Suspension system, discussed more fully below. From the perspective of brand owners, new gTLDs—like the Internet itself—continue to create both opportunities and challenges for protecting intellectual property and serving consumers in the online marketplace.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the Senate IP Subcommittee announces its roster of panels for its first two of three hearings on patent eligibility in America; the U.S. International Trade Commission institutes a Section 337 investigation of lithium ion batteries over trade secret claims; reports indicate that Amazon could buy Boost Mobile; Poland files a formal complaint over the European Union’s new copyright rules; Time settlement leaves open question of copyright infringement for photos embedded on social media posts; Finjan Holdings loses patent infringement claims against Juniper; VoIP-Pal.com announces positive results at the PTAB and U.S. district court; Japan’s IP court hands win to Nintendo in Mario Kart trademark case; and the Federal Circuit vacates district court over failure to consider joining relevant patentee.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: Chinese state political advisors suggest changes to the country’s copyright law, including stronger punitive measures for infringement; President Donald Trump bans Huawei telecommunications equipment from use on U.S. networks; Korean IP offices get ready to study inter-Korean IP cooperation; Huawei and Samsung reach a conclusion to their worldwide patent litigation; AbbVie okays a generic Humira treatment in 2023; Disney escapes Pirates of the Caribbean copyright suit unscathed; Guns N’ Roses files a trademark suit over a beer; Qualcomm enters into another worldwide patent license for 5G technology; and Procter & Gamble unveils its largest research and development center after $400 million upgrade to Ohio facility.

I am Emil Malak, CEO of VoIP-Pal.com Inc., and a named inventor on two U.S. patents–Mobile Gateway: US 8,630,234 & Electrostatic Desalinization and Water Purification: US 8,016,993. To date, our company owns 22 issued and or allowed patents, which we developed over the past 15 years. Against all odds, we have been 100% successful in defending eight Inter Partes Reviews (IPRs): four from Apple, three from AT&T, and one from Unified Patents. We are presently in litigation against Apple, Verizon, AT&T, Twitter and Amazon. My experience with Voip-Pal has made it painfully clear that the deck has been stacked against companies who own IP being used without license by large tech companies. The America Invents Act (AIA), orchestrated by Silicon Valley, was designed to destroy the very ladder they climbed to ascend to their lofty perch, and make certain that they could not be challenged.

In our first article examining the 2018 patent market, we provided an overview of the data and found that prices were stabilizing across listings, buying and selling programs were becoming more streamlined, and there were more transactions overall. This trend extends to “patent packages” as well. At 591 packages (502 last year), listings have increased by 17.7%. The only year in which we saw more listings was the 2016 market. If the assets from Provenance Asset Group were included in these numbers, the numbers would show an all-time high. The number of total assets and of U.S.-issued patents also increased (see Table 2). We have benchmarked our deal flow with that of other large corporations and defensive aggregators and have found that the number of brokered packages we received is generally similar, so we are confident that our numbers reflect the market. Compared to prior years, the total number of U.S.-issued assets listed in packages increased twice as fast as the number of packages listed. Notably though, the total number of assets listed increased even more than the U.S.-issued assets. This signifies the continued importance of international assets and an elevated level of focus on elements of a package other than U.S.-issued assets. But, U.S.-issued assets are still the focus in most listings (see Figure 4). While we limit the types of package included in this dataset to the more common types (e.g. quasi-public/brokered packages containing 200 or fewer assets), we also track larger bulk deals and private deals.

USPTO Director and Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property Andrei Iancu believes that “to a large extent … if they want to, the Federal Circuit can fix the problem” with patentable subject matter under Section 101. Speaking at the 27th Intellectual Property Law & Policy Conference at Fordham Law School on April 25, Mr. Iancu said the interpretation of Section 101 is “the most important issue of substantive patent law currently.” He added: “This issue must be addressed now in the United States.” The USPTO Director said there is consensus that the state of the law is unworkable: “Recent case law has created significant confusion in this regard.” But he added: “If you look at the Supreme Court cases by themselves, those cases are not the ones necessarily that have caused the problem. In the way those cases have been interpreted in the lower courts or at the USPTO itself, we have deviated from the core message of the Supreme Court to some extent.”

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court invited the United States Solicitor General to file a brief expressing its views in the long-running case of Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc. The case highlights the complexities of protecting software via IP rights. As with patents, the courts often struggle to apply copyright concepts to software, leaving companies bleeding time and resources. Determining what can be protected and what can’t be is complex—even for appellate courts.“ These software piracy cases are convoluted because there can be both literal and nonliteral copying, as shown by the Google v. Oracle case,” said Brian Darville, chair of the trademark and copyright practice group at Oblon. “It’s critical for companies to legally safeguard their software and ensure they’re not infringing on their competitors.”

This morning’s edition of the Wall Street Journal carried a front-page article describing how the once mighty and untouchable online-advertising operation at Google has begun to struggle thanks to increased competition. With a disappointing revenue report that shows Google ad revenue slowing, and an inability or refusal to answer questions yesterday on the earnings call, Alphabet stock is currently heading for its worst trading day. Google accounts for over 99.5% of Alphabet revenue, so a slowdown in advertising revenue should be and is alarming. Online advertising revenue is where Google, and therefore Alphabet, derives its revenue.

This week in Other Barks & Bites, governments and intellectual property offices around the world celebrate World IP Day; the U.S. Trade Representative releases its most recent Notorious Markets List; TiVo subsidiary Rovi files another patent suit against licensing holdout Comcast; Amazon ramps up program for connecting sellers with lawyers for patent infringement issues; the USPTO seeks public comments on gathering data for SUCCESS Act study; music industry groups submit letter to Copyright Office regarding Mechanical Licensing Collective membership; and weak China data center sales sends Intel stock tumbling by 7.5 percent.

On March 21, Personalized Media Communications, LLC (PMC), owner of 98 patents covering networked equipment technologies, filed patent lawsuits in the Eastern District of Texas against major tech firms Netflix, Google, and Akamai. The lawsuits claim that the defendants infringed upon intellectual property that covers a major part of the adaptive streaming capabilities for each of the three businesses. In the lawsuits, PMC is asserting claims from six patents it has earned between 2010 and 2017, each titled Signal Processing Apparatus and Methods.

The Framework rolled out by Congress last week to fix Section 101 law in the United States will not improve the current 101 disaster. It codifies current exceptions and even adds an entirely new exception specifically intended to protect big tech monopolies. Congress is pitifully unserious about restoring our innovation engine. For more than 200 years, the U.S. patent system was the primary engine propelling the United States to lead the world in virtually every new technology. But over the last 15 years, activists in Congress, the courts and the administration pulverized this engine to benefit a few huge multinationals in exchange for political donations and favors. Today, the patent system is a complete failure causing technologies critical to our economy, job creation, global technological lead, and national security to flee the U.S. and go to China. In a brutal political irony, the Communist Chinese have a better property rights system than we do here in the U.S.

This week in other IP news, recently released data shows that worldwide revenues for music copyright exceeded $28 billion in 2017, up $2 billion over 2016; reports surface about the  “reverse patent trolling” issue in China; Google retains Williams & Connolly for Supreme Court battle with Oracle despite Shanmugam exit; the Copyright Office holds roundtable discussions on detecting online copyright infringement; Twitter takes down a tweet from President Donald Trump after a copyright complaint; “KINKEDIN” trademark for computer dating site successfully opposed in the UK by LinkedIn; EU antitrust regulators are petitioned to look into Nokia patent licensing practices; and loss of patent exclusivity leads to major job cuts at Gilead Sciences. 

In their latest letter weighing in on intellectual property issues, Senators Thom Tillis and Chris Coons have expressed their concerns about the effects of “serial” inter partes review (IPR) petitions on the U.S. patent system.In March, the senators sent a letter to Karyn Temple, Register of Copyrights, to ask a series of questions about the Copyright Office’s ability to handle the likely impact of Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, LLC. Today’s letter was addressed to USPTO Director Andrei Iancu and similarly asked Iancu to respond to a list of five pointed questions about the Office’s willingness to take action on serial IP challenges.

Patents are often referred to as monopolies. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how patents work to enhance competition. The truth is that a patent is a natural anti-monopoly. In a functioning patent system, inventions become investible assets when they are patented, and the value of the invention increases as market demand increases. Because of the direct relationship between market demand and patent value, a patented invention can attract enough investment to compete with entrenched incumbents in the market for the invention. This effect introduces new competitors into the market who are protected against incumbents for a long enough period that they can survive after the patent expires. Thus, patents act to increase competition by introducing new competitors into the market and thereby create competitive markets. But perhaps even more important, some inventions deliver a strong dose of creative destruction to monopolistic incumbents who did not innovate fast enough, causing those companies to fail and clearing the market of dead weight, thus opening the market to innovative new companies. Patents are the ultimate anti-monopoly in a free market. But for this to work, the market must function undisturbed by crony laws and regulations. A patent must be a presumed valid “exclusive Right.”

The Senate has a busy schedule related to tech and innovation topics for the week of April 8, including hearings on prescription drug pricing, broadband Internet coverage maps developed by the U.S. government, free speech on social media and tech platforms, and clean energy innovations to address climate change. The Senate Environment Committee also has a business meeting this week to discuss a piece of legislation that would support innovation in direct air carbon capture. This week’s tech and innovation lineup at the House of Representatives is a bit lighter, although there are hearings looking at a proposed bill to restore net neutrality, as well as a review of the 2020 budget request for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Elsewhere, the Brookings Institution hosts events on EU-U.S. digital data collaboration and the impact of automation on the future of work, and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation explores funding issues for the National Institutes of Health and their impact on American biomedical innovation.