sion that more than 90,000 patents, held by some 10,000 parties, were related to a single microprocessor. Most large IT companies, realizing that their products may regularly infringe on the patents of their rivals, and vice versa, have struck an implicit truce to keep themselves out of court. Increasingly, however, they have come under fire from so-called “non-practicing entities” (known in the IT industry by the less-charitable moniker “patent trolls”), companies whose primary line of business is the litigation of patent lawsuits.
Trolls purchase patents from inventors and other sources—such as bankrupt companies that are selling off their assets—then sue for infringement, hoping to cash in on settlements and royalties. It’s not clear how many patent trolls currently exist, but there’s no doubt they’ve had an impact on the IT industry. In 2005, Yahoo! was engaged in four patent-related lawsuits; by 2008, the number had swollen to 22. All are plaintiff-driven cases, and most of them were filed in the Eastern District of Texas (a jurisdiction widely considered friendly to patent holders), in spite of the fact that Yahoo! has neither offices nor servers nearby. According to Joseph Siino, Yahoo!’s vice president of intellectual property, each lawsuit costs the company an estimated $2 to $5 million to defend. Other IT firms report similar figures. Terry Al-berstein, director of corporate affairs for Cisco, says that each of the 30 active patent-related suits the company currently faces was brought by a non-practicing entity. The cost of litigation: a staggering $30 to $50 million a year.
How to fight this dramatic drain
on resources? A cross-industry organization called the Coalition for Patent Fairness, with members such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel, was created in 2006 to lobby for litigation reform; a handful of other organizations have taken up the cause, as well. Among the most interesting is the newly formed Allied Security Trust, which seeks to fight patent trolls by acquiring patents and granting member companies nonexclusive rights to use them.
One thing reformers hope to see is a tightening of the standards used to determine patentability. The USPTO is overworked and understaffed, and examiners frequently grant patents to inventions that do not actually merit them, according to some critics. But the real battles happen in court, where a company’s best defense against a claim of infringement is usually to argue that the patent under question is invalid. To be patentable, an invention must be novel, useful, and “ non-obvious” to an expert in the field. It is
this last requirement that has proven troublesome: what is obvious? Until recently, the courts held an invention to be obvious only if it was explicitly prefigured by prior “teaching, suggestion, or motivation.” On the other hand, as critics point out, when something is obvious, few people write it down.
The stalled Patent Reform Act tried to address the problem through a controversial post-grant review process that would have made it easier to challenge the validity of a patent. Currently, patents can be challenged through special re-examination proceedings at the USPTO, which are widely seen as cumbersome and ineffectual, or by litigation. The Patent Reform Act would have created a three-judge tribunal whose sole purpose would be to consider patent validity in a less costly and more efficient fashion than in court. Though many companies supported the tribunal’s creation, others worried it would subject patents to potentially endless challenges unless temporal limits were applied to its jurisdiction. Just how many months or years after the granting of a patent the tribunal should be able to rule on a patent’s validity was the subject of fierce arguments.
Despite these legislative battles, the courts have begun to reconsider the issue of obviousness on their own. The U.S. Supreme Court reset the bar last spring when it ruled that the combination of two existing technologies was not “non-obvious” and thus did not deserve a patent. Welcomed by many in the IT industry as an important step toward reform, the decision also granted examiners and courts more discretion to use “common sense” when determining the obviousness of
A team of Japanese researchers
has demonstrated a system
that uses ultrasound waves
to create “virtual” objects in
mid-air, BBc news reports. the
system, developed by takayuki
iwamoto and colleagues from
the university of tokyo, uses
ultrasonic transducers, which
produce ultrasound. As sound is a
pressure wave, once the inaudible sound waves from the transducers interfere, the waves create a focal point that is perceived as a solid object. A camera tracks the position of a user’s hand and shifts the transducers’ output to move the focus around with the movement of the hand. the result: a feeling of tracing the
virtual object’s surface or edges in mid-air with one’s bare hands.
the system is “the first of its kind,” says stephen Brewster, a haptics researcher at the university of glasgow. “You can feel it with both hands, rather than having just a single point of contact, and multiple people can use it at the same time.”
iwamoto’s team is currently adjusting how the transducers are driven in order to create realistic textures and shapes. the team plans to combine their system with 3d modeling software and video games, and has received proposals from several entertainment companies.
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