Big bucks, big drugs and more
1. Interesting takes on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s opposition to the post-grant review provisions of S.1145, the Patent Reform Act of 2007:
2. USPTO - Soon-to-be a two billion dollar agency:
3. See, I told you the patent system works - $20 Billion dollars worth of drugs reportedly go off-patent this year
4. An interesting note from an introspective inventor - My Dumb Software Patents
After eight years of pendancy for his recently-issued patent, Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit Networks, makes some very interesting comments on the prosecution process and patents in general.
Money quotes:
“it is really all wasted time and effort, at least in a conceptual sense. There is no way for a software engineer or system architect to have any idea what exists out there to either copy or avoid (whatever the motivation).”
“But more importantly, I have absolutely no confidence that the patent I just received is really actually valid. You read a lot of debate out there about how many patents are overturned or invalidated in court during litigation. I really don’t know how many are invalidated, but I can say having seen the process pretty close that I have no doubt that most of the key patents out there around “computer screen sharing” (used heavily in web conferencing) contain a good deal of the same concepts and they all have been awarded over the last 20 years. They simply claim the same things. Or, at least they don’t meet the bar of being unique and unobvious.”
5. Research In Motion spends big bucks on patent reform lobbying
Several claims were published this week about RIM spending over $800k on lobbying efforts on the patent reform issue. Be careful….the disclosed amount also includes lobbying on “regulatory rules to make more digital wireless handsets accessible to consumers with hearing disabilities.”
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