Summary: Coming to grips with the fact that productive industries are being crushed for the sake of lawyers, whose firms often act as a front for exploitative patent trolls and monopolies

TODAY we've been focused on the European Patent Office (EPO), whose wrongly-granted patents -- or Early Certaintyâ„¢ -- have already caused companies to collapse (example from this year).

The CCIA's coverage at the Disruptive Competition Project (in addition to its own site) was mentioned here yesterday in relation to the effect of trolls with low-quality (and likely invalid) patents.

Sometimes patent lawsuits crush/crash companies (as do ITC-imposed embargoes as we showed earlier this year after Cisco had filed a complaint). To quote an example from yesterday:

Cochlear Limited (ASX:COH) share price sinks lower on patent infringement news

This morning the company announced that the United States District Court in Los Angeles has ruled against it in the patent infringement lawsuit by the Alfred E. Mann Foundation for Scientific Research (AMF) and Advanced Bionics LLC (AB).

There's also NPR’s article from last week titled "The Tinder-Bumble Feud: Dating Apps Fight Over Who Owns The Swipe". As we noted here before, these are truly pathetic patent disputes over incredibly trivial ideas that never merited any patents in the first place. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should never have accepted such patents in the first place. ⬆