Matt Levy works for CCIA (occasionally a Microsoft proxy) now

Summary: Matthew ('Matt') Levy moved into a foe of patent progress last year, but he still runs a site calls Patent Progress, in which he diverts all attention to patent trolls (as large corporations such as Microsoft like to do)

WE ARE excited to see that after the USPTO had begun rejecting software patents and CAFC had ruled against 'abstract' software patents (owing to SCOTUS) there was impact by extrapolation. As TechDirt puts it, "Latest CAFC Ruling Suggests A Whole Lot Of Software Patents Are Likely Invalid". Another patents expert (especially expert in patent trolls) puts it like this: "The most litigious "patent troll" in the US has lost a major case after the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found its patent was too abstract."

We continue to be disappointed by the site Patent Progress (notice which controversial entities its writers are affiliated with). The name is misleading and it's a dot-org too, despite corporate connections. We wrote about this in the past, before we knew that Matt Levy, its main writer, "joined the CCIA in 2013" (see our Wiki page about CCIA).

Levy continues to favour the IBM-style OIN-esque aggregation of patents. From his latest post: "A coalition of tech companies (Google, Canon, SAP, Newegg, Dropbox and Asana) recently announced a new private initiative to disarm patent trolls: the License on Transfer Network (LOT). This is essentially an extension of Google’s Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge (OPN) that I wrote about in my very first Patent Progress post last year."

We recently saw several links (e.g. in Twitter) pointing at our older (and sceptical) analysis of Patent Progress. It seems that not only us have noticed the change of agenda, or lack of coherent agenda. Not a word has been said in Patent Progress about the above news, which is massive! Is Patent Progress becoming as credible as 'Consumer' Watchdog'? To 'Consumer' Watchdog', only Google is a problem (it seems like an extension of Microsoft's "Scroogled" PR) and to Patent Progress, the only problem is patent trolls, not patent scope. ⬆