Posts Tagged: "IBM"

The Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force convened in order to hear from patent experts on the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in TC Heartland, the IPR process and patent eligibility, and to discuss what Congress can do in terms of additional patent reform in order to improve the U.S. patent system… The Hatch op-ed would seem to be music to the ears of beleaguered patent owners in the life science and computer implemented innovation areas. The problem, however, is with those the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force heard from during this private meeting.

East Palo Alto, CA-based web security firm Finjan Holdings recently filed a Form 8-K with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which disclosed a patent assignment agreement made with Armonk, NY-based information technology giant IBM (NYSE:IBM). Under the terms of the agreement, Finjan Blue, a newly formed subsidiary of Finjan, will acquire a series of IBM security-related patents with potential pathways for the IBM and Finjan to work collaboratively on development of those patented technologies.

A $1 trillion a year industry not wanting to pay innovators less than a 1% royalty on the innovations they appropriate (i.e., steal) for their own profits seems like a terrible price to pay given the national security and economic consequences of forfeiting our world leadership to the Europeans and Chinese… Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google or Uber a patent troll? What about General Electric, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Whirlpool, Kraft Foods, Caterpillar, Seiko Epson, Amgen, Bayer, Genzyme, Sanofi-Aventis, and Honeywell, to name just a few?

Schecter joins other CIPU directors, Marshall Phelps (retired head of IP Business and Strategy at Microsoft and IBM), Brian Hinman (Chief IP Officer at Philips), Keith Bergelt (Open Invention Network CEO) and Harry Gwinnell (former head of IP at Cargill and founding President of the IPO Education Foundation).

In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected President of the United States. Hurricane Andrew bore down on the American Southeast, causing billions in damage after wreaking destruction from Florida to Louisiana. Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show. The Buffalo Bills were in the Super Bowl. Los Angeles saw a string of deadly riots related to the LAPD’s televised beating of Rodney King. And 1992 was the last year during which a company other than American information technology firm IBM (NYSE:IBM) could claim that it had earned the greatest number of U.S. patents… With over 8,000 patents IBM stands supreme in the US patent world, earning the most US patents in 2016 and claiming the top spot for the 24th year in a row.

Recently, we took a closer look at four of the largest trending stories playing out in the world of intellectual property and patents during 2016. Today we turn to the world of technology to see what trends have been developing in the technology sector over the past year. From an ever-widening scope of business activities being pursued by Silicon Valley’s largest firms to growing government authority over one sector of Internet services, there have been plenty of interesting stories playing out on the stage of America’s tech sector.

In terms of sheer numbers, in the CB Insights study, which curiously did not include patent giant and American research juggernaut IBM, Microsoft ranks supreme among this collection of five major tech firms. The Redmond, WA-based hardware and software developer has applied for a total of 16,840 patents over the seven years of the study. In second place is Google with 14,596 patent applications over the same time period. Although exact numbers for the other three firms weren’t publicly released by CB Insights, these two firms are followed by Apple (13,420 patent applications), Amazon (5,186) and Facebook (2,508), respectively. Collectively, these five companies have been pushing towards a total of 10,000 patent applications filed per year. This trend marks a sharp rise in patent application filing activities among the Big 5, which filed 3,565 patent applications collectively in 2009.

With 22 vendors currently on the IAM Market, the online portal has seen about 50 percent growth since launching last year. “To be honest, my ambition is that we’d be further down the road than we are now with vendors,” Stewart said. Although he was pleased with the patent marketplace’s current status, he’d be “plenty more pleased” when they have 50 or more vendors on the site. Stewart also expressed some surprise as to the amount of information available in some of theportfolio presentations provided by vendor companies to IAM Market. “These are major corporations looking to monetize assets, we thought they would just have presentation packs that could be uploaded, but in many cases it’s not,” he said.

Although the type of copyright infringement that gets the most attention today in our digital age is the downloading of music and/or movies, infringement of print and picture medium (such as photographs) is also punishable under the Copyright Act, and are a very real problem for publishers and photographers alike. Indeed, copyright infringement is an unfortunate reality for all content…

With the advent of enhancements in audio-video technology, Virtual-Reality (VR) has taken the world by storm. While VR has been enjoying most of the limelight, another similar technology – Augmented Reality (AR) is catching up fast. The patent landscape of VR is dominated by Sony followed by IBM, Samsung and Microsoft when it comes to total number of patented inventions. Microsoft is the leader in AR when it comes to the number of inventions filed as patents. It has 602 issued patents and published applications distributed among 151 inventions. Microsoft is followed by Samsung, Sony, LG and Qualcomm.

IBM has been wading further into the medical fields over the past few years thanks to the strength of its cognitive computing division, especially the rise of Watson Health. Last year, we covered the news that Watson Health had picked up its first major corporate partner in Israeli generic medication developer Teva Pharmaceuticals (NYSE:TEVA). Near the end of May, IBM made a significant hire for its Watson Health division by bringing aboard Dr. Paul Tang, formerly the chief innovation officer (CIO) and chief technology officer (CTO) for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Watson Health already has grown its list of partnering consumer health developers including Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) and Medtronic, Inc. (NYSE:MDT)

Groupon’s complaint and spokespersons have been widely reported that labels IBM as a “dial-up dinosaur” and “a relic of once-great 20th Century technology firms” that is now resorting “to usurping the intellectual property of companies born this millennium.” But IBM spends $5 billion annual on R&D investment, which outpaced Groupon’s total 2015 revenues of $3.1 billion. It’s seems a tough argument to make that a tech firm that invests more money in R&D than the other company earns in a year is somehow a “relic” that is only “usurping” the innovation of this millennium.

The law waits for no one and neither does AI, which has already made a lasting impact in many areas of business, including the practice of law. Contracts, e-discovery and overall legal research have all changed thanks to AI, but as computers driven by ever-increasing processing power exhibit extraordinarily intelligent behavior we can only assume such advances are far from over. Whether within the enterprise, partners, customers, opposing litigants or elsewhere, legal assets cannot hide from the likes of Watson—or for that matter HAL—or other budding or to-be-conceived AI platforms… Despite paranoia and hyperbole surrounding AI since 2001: A Space Odyssey, intelligent computers will not take over the world, although that premise does make for exciting science fiction. While the rise of the machines is not something one should fear, AI systems and their architects have made significant strides in realizing learning machines that can adapt to dense, arcane legal terminology.

Showing a bowl of spaghetti on one of his first few PowerPoint slides set the tone. The law as it applies to software patent eligibility is a tangled mess. “The Supreme Court has continually taken cases in this area and rather than clarify they have continued to hang on,” Schecter explained referencing the fact that the Supreme Court seems committed to the belief that their 101 jurisprudence is consistent and reconcilable. Of course, that is not the case. “There are too many cases that conflict with each other.” He is right. Schecter would go on to say that we are at a point where a legislative fix seems necessary.

the Courts have found it difficult to use the Mayo two-part test in the examination of a patent’s validity thus creating great uncertainty… One should not confuse the uncertainty of the complex U.S. patent system with the clarity of the Alice decision. There is no reason to believe any new legislation will provide any improvement in deciding what should, and what should not, be patentable.