NEWS SITES are abuzz with reports and more formal documents that all provide an assessment of news we last touched on yesterday.
“In the Chief Justice’s first three terms, the high court heard five different patent cases, and all of them resulted in unanimous or near-unanimous reversals of pro-patent decisions by the Federal Circuit.”
--Timothy B. Lee"But when the Federal Circuit became the only court ruling on patent cases, there were no more circuit splits and no more competing legal precedents. That might be why the Supreme Court seems to have barely noticed that the Federal Circuit was dramatically reshaping patent law in the 1990s. The high court reviewed only about a dozen Federal Circuit decisions between 1982 and 2004, and the ones it did review tended to be on narrow, technical issues. The Supreme Court finally began to give the Federal Circuit’s handiwork some serious scrutiny when Chief Justice John Roberts took the bench. And the justices did not like what they saw. In the Chief Justice’s first three terms, the high court heard five different patent cases, and all of them resulted in unanimous or near-unanimous reversals of pro-patent decisions by the Federal Circuit."
Might we see the next steps in a reform within weeks? Months? Years? Either way, it is a step in the right direction. Katherine Noyes' good piece on why software patents need to go was mentioned by TechDirt, which also notes that: "There's been a lot of attention lately to the massive problems with the patent system. Finally the problem has gone mainstream, in part thanks to the excellent This American Life episode on problems with the patent system. That seems to have emboldened other mainstream publications to finally run articles pointing out problems with the patent system, including the NY Times, the Huffington Post and PC World.
"Then there's the Economist, who actually was one of the first mainstream publications to highlight problems with the patent system..."
Masnick writes this very long post (with a list of prominent critics of software patents) and he then makes a very detailed list of suggestions. Add to his list of critics the Washington Post, which has just published the article titled "The Terrible Cost Of Patents", noting:
The cost of patents is going up, and that is not a good thing. After all, Google is paying $12.5 billion for Motorola largely for its huge mobile patent portfolio. In July, an anti-Google consortium ponied up $4.5 billion Nortel’s patents (and they overpayed). Interdigital, Kodak, and others are looking to sell their patent portfolios. We are in the middle of a patent bubble.
If you think about the cost of these patents, technology companies are spending billions of dollars on assets which they need primarily to defend themselves against the rising tide of patent litigation. Those are billions of dollars that Google, Apple, Microsoft and others won’t invest in new products, new jobs, new facilities or other economically productive activities. And by and large, they will not use these patents to create new products. Google is doing it just to protect Android from rival patent claims.
Patents are a big draw these days and there’s no doubt that HP has a huge portfolio of patents that could bring in billions of dollars.