2013 Patent Litigation costs

Just a few data points for future reference:


According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), in 2013 typical patent litigation costs were as follows:

Source: AIPLA 2013 Report of the Economic Survey

Surprisingly, the costs stayed close to 2005 levels:

Source: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Law. 3rd ed.

The textbook mentions that "Intellectual property represents approximately 70% of an average firm’s value."

tags: patents, law, economics

History of a lawsuit: Lucent vs Microsoft.

In 2002, Lucent brought a patent infringement lawsuit against two PC manufacturers over US4763356, Touch Screen Form Entry System. Microsoft intervened and became a party in the suit.


Originally, Lucent requested $561M in damages, while Microsoft offered $6.5M in response.
In 2009, a jury awarded Lucent $358M, but the judge ruled the award excessive. In 2011, a re-trial jury awarded Lucent $70M, but US District Judge in San Diego reduced the award to $26.3M.

 

Today, Lucent and Microsoft settled for an undisclosed sum. 

tags: patent, law, business

Lunch Talk: (Authors@Google) Lawrence Lessig

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig takes a clear-eyed look at how we arrived at this crisis: how fundamentally good people, with good intentions, have allowed our democracy to be co-opted by outside interests, and how this exploitation has become entrenched in the system. Rejecting simple labels and reductive logic-and instead using examples that resonate as powerfully on the Right as on the Left-Lessig seeks out the root causes of our situation. He plumbs the issues of campaign financing and corporate lobbying, revealing the human faces and follies that have allowed corruption to take such a foothold in our system.

Link

tags: lunchtalk, innovation, control, law

The brave new China: innovation by decree.

The mayor of Beijing has a simple policy. If you want to buy a gasoline-fueled car, you enter into this lottery, and if you win, you can drive that car four days out of seven. If you would like to drive seven days of seven, you have to buy an electric car. That looks like a great opportunity. They are, in this way, creating clean-tech markets.

This is from the MTR interview with Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder of a battery startup, who moved her company from the US to China. Read the whole piece; it's a good example of how China tries to address its scalability problems I posted about earlier. Air pollution in Beijing and other major cities is one of those problems, which the drastic innovation measures are intended to solve.

tags: scale, problem, solution, innovation, diffusion, startup. storage

Lunchtalk: Intellectual Property rights, Howard Anawalt

Howard Anawalt discusses his new book Idea Rights. Idea Rights presents a concise and accurate view of United States intellectual property law for the interested general reader, for attorneys, and for classes that introduce or otherwise cover the material.

tags: lunchtalk, intellectual, property, law, 

How easy it is to intimidate scientists with patent-related legal threats! Andre Geim, a 2010 Nobel laureate in physics, somebody who defied authority and common wisdom in his own field, believed empty talk served to him by a corporate lawyer. Here's an excerpt from Geim's interview to the Nature magazine:

Q: You haven't yet patented graphene. Why is that?

A: We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, "We've got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?" It's quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.

Invention of the Day: Patent for an Invention

...in 1447 Venice passed the first general statute providing for patents covering inventions. It allowed that inventors or introducers of devices new to the Venetian territory would be protected against imitators for ten years; at the same time it formally compelled all inventors to reveal their inventions to the state, which was exempt from the patent restriction and could freely appropriate them.

Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Guttenberg to Gates, by Adrian Johns, 2009. p. 200.

This is how the perpetum mobile of human society works: invention has value because we agreed, some six centuries ago, to think it has value.

tags: invention, innovation, space, law, information, distribution, control, quote, history

The cloack and dagger war between Apple and Google continues. It appears that Google might be locked out of the emerging market for mobile advertisement on Apple devices:

Apple quietly changed the terms of service for the iPhone developer agreement Monday along with the release of developer version of iOS4 at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, according to MediaMemo and several other blogs. If preliminary interpretations of a key section are correct, Google's newly acquired AdMob subsidiary will be unable to share ad analytic information with its customers who have placed ads in applications on the iPhone, rendering those ads much less valuable.

Either this is a legal quirk, or, more likely, Apple intends to extract from Google a heavy price for playing on the wrong side of their prisoner's dilemma game. In the meantime, Google protests the agreement.

tags: battle, technology, apple, google, advertisement, business, law, information, tool, detection

Apple patents listed against HTC:

• Patent No. 7,362,331: “Time-Based, Non-Constant Translation Of User Interface Objects Between States”
• Patent No. 7,479,949: “Touch Screen Device, Method, And Graphical User Interface For Determining Commands By Applying Heuristics”
• Patent No. 7,657,849: “Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image”
• Patent No. 7,469,381: “List Scrolling And Document Translation, Scaling, And Rotation On A Touch-Screen Display”
• Patent No. 5,920,726: “System And Method For Managing Power Conditions Within A Digital Camera Device.”
• Patent No. 7,633,076: “Automated Response To And Sensing Of User Activity In Portable Devices”
• Patent No. 5,848,105: “GMSK Signal Processors For Improved Communications Capacity And Quality”
• Patent No. 7,383,453: “Conserving Power By Reducing Voltage Supplied To An Instruction-Processing Portion Of A Processor”
• Patent No. 5,455,599: “Object-Oriented Graphic System”
• Patent No. 6,424,354: “Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods”

At first glance, they don't look that broad. The lawsuit is likely to cause a one- or two-year product deployment delay, not a knockout punch against Google and/or its hardware partners.

tags: patent, apple, google, mobile, law, battle

Berners-Lee talks about Web Science - a discipline of "studying the effect of the web within disciplines like social science, economics, psychology and law."

So, I started thinking about the web as a sensing and perception ability, like vision, hearing, and all other human senses. The key difference, of course, is that the web is a collective, rather than an individual "perceptor". To explore the idea further, I asked myself several questions: How does the web perceive my favorite subjects, invention and technology? Is there a way to find out? How can we find applications for our sixth web-sense?

Either by accident or design, I decided to use Google Timeline, which helped me once before. And see what I got (click on the picture below to enlarge):

To me the contrast between the graphs looks amazing! According to the web, invention (the top graph) reached its peak in the mid-19th century. And right after that, technology (the bottom graph) took off. I will do some more data digging, but a new question is already on my mind: What is going to succeed technology?