Last Friday, the Supreme Court granted two patent cases, Limelight Networks v. Akamai Technologies and Nautilus v. Biosig Instruments. That makes six patent cases for this term, and Matt helpfully summarized all of them yesterday. The prevalence of patent-related issues on SCOTUS’s docket demonstrates how much Congress needs to #fixpatents.
On Wednesday, Matt covered the recent announcement that notorious bottom feeder trollAn entity in the business of being infringed — by analogy to the mythological troll that exacted payments from the unwary. Cf. NPE, PAE, PME. See Reitzig and Henkel, Patent Trolls, the Sustainability of ‘Locking-in-to-Extort’ Strategies, and Implications for Innovating Firms. MPHJ has been sued by the New York Attorney General — and that they have sued the FTCU.S. Federal Trade Commission. An independent regulatory agency charged with consumer protection and competition policy, which conducted several influential studies on how patents work in practice. Authored several key studies: 2003’s To Promote Innovation: The Proper Balance of Competition and Patent Law and Policy [PDF] and 2011’s The Evolving IP Marketplace: Aligning Patent Notice and Remedies with Competition [PDF].. (I know, right?) He also wrote a post about how despite Intellectual Ventures’ new attempts at transparency, they still have a trolling business model, and they still are exploiting the patent system.
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