Summary: Trading Technologies, a patents-hoarding firm, is disappointed to see its software patents ebbing away
Trading Technologies is not an ordinary firm. It has a Vice President of "Intellectual Property" [sic] and it is working with Microsoft, a notorious patent aggressor.
"Money, not innovation, gets converted into patents, which are later used as weapons or sold to some entity that weaponises them."Those 500 patents that Henrion referred to are patents granted by the USPTO with its utterly rubbish patents (almost every application is eventually successful). It's more like a rubber-stamping operation. Money, not innovation, gets converted into patents, which are later used as weapons or sold to some entity that weaponises them. Every software patent in existence is therefore problematic.
To quote the relevant parts of the IAM interview:
The company has a portfolio of more than 500 US patents and, like many patent owners engaged in protecting their portfolios against alleged infringers...
Last month, I sat down with Steve Borsand the company’s executive vice president of IP, to talk about the patent climate in the US. He had plenty to say about proposed new patent legislation, the impact of recent Supreme Court decisions such as Alice and how the review procedures at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) are changing patent litigation. This is part one of the interview and tomorrow we’ll run part two.
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Almost all -- like 99% of them [patents] have come from people here at TT. There have been a couple that we’ve purchased but for the most part our innovations have been developed in-house.
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Yeah -- back in 2014 someone tried to file against five, four of them were instituted and then we ultimately settled with that party and those were all dismissed and now recently there’s been another set. At least another five and then two more so it’s been like 12 -- I don’t have the exact number.