patents

While just about everyone is sick and tired of the constant barrage of patent lawsuits among smartphone vendors, it seems that tech companies themselves keep plugging precious resources into suing one another despite having fairly little to show for it. Analysis by The Wall Street Journal has found that “courts have proven as likely to deliver plaintiffs a rebuke as a win, and the slow grinding of the justice system has sapped the impact of the occasional big victories” in patent lawsuits. More →

While more patent suits may be the last thing the mobile industry needs, it seems that’s what it’s going to get no matter what. AllThingsD points us to a new study from analyst Chetan Sharma projecting that one-fourth of all patents issued in the United States this year will be mobile-related, up from just 5% in 2001. Sharma also finds that Samsung (005930) was the leader in mobile patents granted last year, which makes sense because the company has been working to boost its mobile patent portfolio to ward off more potential lawsuits from Apple (AAPL) such as the high-stakes patent suit that the company lost last summer. Sharma says that the surge in mobile patents is unsurprising since smartphones and tablets have quickly become “the growth engine of the knowledge economy,” which gives companies a lot more incentive to patent everything they can to both maximize their returns on R&D and to prevent potential suits from patent trolls.

You wouldn’t like Mark Cuban when he’s angry, patent trolls. In an interview with TechCrunch this week, the famed businessman and investor issued a sweeping broadside against the United States patent system by claiming that “dumbass patents are crushing small businesses.” Cuban has recently teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation digital rights group to start a campaign to “eliminate stupid patents” that he says is trying to “get the message to politicians that patent trolls are costing taxpayers… and small businesses money that could otherwise be used for innovation and creating jobs.” Cuban says that he’d like to either end software patents or give them a much shorter shelf life, to end design patents all together, and to ”require that all patents be used in a business within five years or otherwise become public domain.” It’s tough to say whether any of Cuban’s recommendations will ever see the light of day, but it is nice to see yet another high-profile voice calling for reform of American intellectual property laws.

The United States Department of Justice is wondering what part of “standard essential patents” tech companies don’t understand. Per Reuters, the DOJ and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week put out a joint policy statement saying that companies should only be entitled to modest monetary compensation if others use their standard essential patents, and that they shouldn’t use those patents to seek outright sales bans of rivals’ products. The agencies’ reassertion of this principle is notable because Google (GOOG) last week agreed to stop using the standard essential patents acquired from Motorola in offensive patent lawsuits against competitors. Standard essential patents, for those who don’t know, cover key technologies that entire industries need to use in order to operate. Typically owners of these patents must agree to license them in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory fashion.

According to research from a law professor at Santa Clara University, individuals and companies that do not create technology themselves but instead acquire patents to target other companies were behind a majority of the patent infringement lawsuits in the United States in 2012 for the first time ever, Reuters reported. These companies, more commonly known as patent trolls, have accounted for 61% of all patent lawsuits filed through December 1st, compared to 45% in 2011 and 23% in 2007. More →