Posts Tagged: "innovation"

If a weak patent system were the answer you would expect countries that have a weak patent system, or no patent system at all, to have run away innovation. What you see, however, is the exact opposite. Those that want to dismantle the patent system or further weaken patent rights should bear a heavy burden to demonstrate the veracity of their claims. They should be required to prove that innovation at current levels will at a minimum be guaranteed to maintain at current levels if we are to take a leap of faith and disregard what history, common sense and the law of economics predicts will happen.

There’s almost no limit to the range of practical items that could be created through 3D printing equipment. A team of chemical researchers working at the University of Illinois have created a 3D printer capable of creating small molecules less than 900 daltons in molecular weight for the manufacture of pharmaceutical agents. A similar project at Glasgow University in Scotland resulted in the development of a 3D printing process for creating a series of precise reacting chambers which could be injected with chemical reagent “inks,” also performed by the printer, for making complex molecules. Specialized 3D printing equipment has been created for fabricating dental devices such as permanent crowns and denture frames. There’s even a 3D printer designed to use filaments of graphene, an incredibly hyped substance which is essentially a two-dimensional lattice form of carbon.

Universities are dependent upon the U.S. patent system and the capacity of that system to protect the legitimate intellectual property rights of individual university inventors and large companies alike. This system drives U.S. innovation and our economic competitiveness in the world. Patents provide universities with the means to ensure that many discoveries resulting from research are transferred to the private sector where those discoveries can be turned into innovative products and processes that power our economy, create jobs, and improve quality of life.

Fortunately, a new study showing that academic patent licensing contributed more than $1 trillion to the U.S. economy over eighteen years blows the stuffing right out of that straw man. We can only hope Congress gets the message before it turns the patent system into a weapon to squash inventors.

It’s impossible to actually support the idea that patents harm smartphone innovation because there is no consumer product that has changed so much over the past decade thanks to innovation. And if patents would get in the way of anything, it would definitely get in the way of an industry which accounted for one out of every six active patents. But more smartphones are being sold than ever before and new improvements continue to be developed, from curved touchscreens to waterproof phones to dual-screen phones.

Large companies can steal your patented technology, make a great deal of money, ignore you all together, and then have the resources, the vast resources in most cases, to delay your enforcement actions or actually destroy your patents by any means necessary. So the only recourse left for me and others like me is to bring suite to protect my invention – my intellectual property rights. However, the loser pay clause in HR 9 would be a showstopper for me. Bringing a suit against a patent infringer would be too much of a risk for me and my family now and I’ve already used my life savings and family inheritance and hard work for over 15 years plus the untold impact on my family just to develop and maintain my patents. I just do not believe the independent inventor is the problem.

There is no credible evidence behind proposals to make the drastic changes embodied in the Innovation Act, the removal of discretion from judges to judge each case on an individual basis with mandatory stays and fee shifting, and new rules for pleading and discovery that would undermine the ability of legitimate inventors and patent holders from enforcing their rights against infringers.

The pursuit of pi, the numerical constant which represents the ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference, is a subject which has driven mathematicians to extremes. The date 3/14/15 coincides with pi calculated to five digits (3.1415). The next time this will occur will be 100 years from now, making this year’s Pi Day a once in a century event.

Earlier today 40 economists and law professors wrote to Senate and House Judiciary leaders explaining that the data it that keeps being cited to justify HR 9, otherwise known as the Innovation Act, is “flawed, unreliable and incomplete.” The professors caution Congress to proceed cautiously, particularly given the numerous misleading and flawed studies that “highly exaggerated claims regarding patent trolls.”

Carly Fiorina: ‘[W]atch carefully who is supporting that [the Innovation Act]. It’s not the small it’s the big. It’s the big companies whose ongoing economic benefit depends upon their ability to acquire innovations and patents at a lower cost.”

Senator Coons: ”[P]atents are not just foundational. Patents are really about the American Dream. They are about what it means to come to this country or be from this country and believe in the possibility that you and a team of folks that you work with can invent and develop and then protect a groundbreaking innovation. Patents are about constantly laying a stronger foundation upon which future generations can continue to innovate and about insuring we will find solutions to the challenges that face us, not just here but around the world… So here is the truth. We need to both strengthen patents and target real abuse. They are not mutually exclusive…”

The summit will bring together entrepreneurs, business leaders, academics, government officials, and thought leaders in the innovation ecosystem to engage on how government, academia, and industry can work together to spur economic growth. The event will include panels on the evolving role of urban innovation in the American economy, the role of government and universities in technology development, and discussions on what investors and startups want to see in developing policy around innovation.

There are a variety of problems with this paper, the conclusions reached and the methodology. Perhaps the largest problem is that Professors Feldman and Lemley rely on subjective evidence rather than volumes of objective evidence that contradict the self-serving responses from those who are licensing rights they are already infringing. What else would you suspect from a homogenous subset of individuals who collectively don’t like the patent system very much? Collective bias seems a far more likely answer as to why there is “near unanimity,” as the Professors claim. Even so, how is it possible that any group could ever achieve near unanimity about anything? The fact that there was near unanimity demands one to question whether there is a bias or flaw in the survey, yet no such inquiry seems to have been made.

They use early IPOs as an alternative to traditional venture funding. But one of the things that the investors place a huge importance on is a very sophisticated, robust patent operation. So whereas it used to be you’d have a new company and it could take years even to get some sort of sophistication, we’re now doing it on day one. And the results have been great to see. Over the last few months we have filed close to a hundred patent applications for these entities. We’re able to do that because we have been able to negotiate favorable deals with the law firms we use and we can pass that on to the clients. So our goal is to really be creating companies and crafting their portfolios from day one. Essentially, my partner and I work to insource a very sophisticated patent operation for a company that ordinarily wouldn’t have had that capability.

It is good business for Google to have a weaker patent system, but insulating the natural monopoly that Google has become by destroying the patent system isn’t the answer for a prosperous America. As a result of misguided patent reform and bad judicial decisions a primary foundation of the great American economic engine is unnecessarily crumbling. It doesn’t need to be this way, but if we do not act soon, we will all pay dearly for this historic blunder.