Waiting Out A Patent Fight With EBay
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Thomas G. Woolston  is trying to start an online travel site named uBid Travel. He's negotiating with hotels, brokering partnerships with airlines and making sure the site looks just right.
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A spat that erupted this week between eBay and Google over dueling celebrations might presage more tension in one of the Internet's budding rivalries.
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Online auction giant eBay has been implicated in piracy lawsuits. The Software & Information Industry Association is suing several eBay sellers as part of its campaign to stop auctioning of pirated software.
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You back my patent, I'll back yours. That could be the software giant's motto in its quest for intellectual property.
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IBM will donate 500 patents for free use. Also:  Yahoo joins Google with hard drive search engine & hellip;.  Inconclusive report on cell phones: Are they a health hazard? & hellip;. and more.
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Yesterday I heard rumors that there might not be enough bids to fully subscribe the Google auction at $108. For Google and the market&#39;s sake, I hope that&#39;s not true. I would like to see an auction market develop for IPOs.
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(InfoWorld) - A government-funded research institute in Taiwan has opened a patent Web site for an October fire sale of IT patents, hoping to match international sellers with Taiwanese buyers. TheÂ Web siteÂ aims to collect patents for a variety of electronics technologies. They include WiMax high speed wireless Internet connectivity LCD-TV (liquid crystal display television); 3G (third generation) and other telecommunications; and LED (light emitting diode) and a host of audio/visual technologies, including HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc. "Many companies have an inventory of unused patents from shelved projects that no longer fit the company's business strategy or core business...However, an organization's unproductive patents may be very valuable to another company," the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) said in a statement on Friday. ITRI hopes to play matchmaker in such cases. The research group is encouraging companies globally to sell their patents to Taiwanese companies through the auction. It is collecting patent information at the Web site and will promote them ahead of the October auctionÂ in Chinese. The international side of the site is English-only, and ITRI is charging $100 per patent family listing, according to the site. Any organization listing more than 20 patents will be given a discount. Patents are listed under seven categories: IC Fabless (integrated circuit), TFT-LCD (thin-film-crystal-liquid crystal display), Digital TV, Digital Broadcasting, Wireless Communication & Networking, LED, and Audio/Visual. Taiwanese companies have been creating and buying patents for years, for many reasons. The main reason is to protect intellectual property and profit by licensing deals. Companies can also increase the number of patents they hold to enter cross-license agreements with major patent holders, instead of paying licensing fees. Such measures reducing business costs. Users tend to benefit from corporate cost reductions because stiff competition in most technology fields means companies must constantly seek ways to lower the prices of their products.
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Options, beautiful options. How dost thou delay me?
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An eBay seller and Universal Music Group are battling in a legal case that could have wider implications for a consumer's right to resell purchased music.
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A brand new year and already so much to purge. It is time for eBay, that all-season national yard sale. But who wants to put up with the annoyances of holding an eBay auction?
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The chances of a user being sued for intellectual property (IP) infringement related to software usage are slim, industry observers say. But that may change, as some companies hoard patents for the express purpose of using them to extract money from sellers and users of software.
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(InfoWorld) - U.S. technology vendors submitted five patent applications for last Friday's launch of a Web site that allows the public to review proposals before patents are granted. Less than a week later, the public had submitted claims of previous inventions that could invalidate each one. The prior art submissions may not pan out, but if they do, that's OK with the technology vendors. Prior art refers to existing inventions. "It's not a negative if we don't get a patent that we don't deserve," said Manny Schecter, associate general counsel for IBM Corp., an early supporter of the Peer-to-Patent project. "We don't want to have a false sense of security that we have a valuable asset that we don't really have." Peer-to-Patent's exposure of prior art will weed out patents that would likely face challenges down the line, added Curt Rose, associate general counsel for Hewlett-Packard Co. "We don't want to get patents issued that aren't valid," he said. "That's just a waste of time and money and resources for us and everybody else." Peer-to-Patent is a year-long pilot program offered through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy. The pilot, which covers patent applications for computer architecture, software and information security, launched June 15 with the support of several tech vendors. IBM, HP, Intel Corp. and Red Hat Inc. each submitted patent applications to help launch the program. The program has multiple goals, chief among them to weed out invalid patents, said Beth Noveck, a professor at the New York Law School who originally proposed the program in July 2005. Many tech vendors have pushed Congress to fix what they see as a broken patent system, and one of the biggest concerns is that overworked USPTO examiners grant too many undeserving patents. One goal is to "improve the quality of patents by providing the patent office with more and better information about inventions for which applications are filed," Noveck said. "We want to prevent the issuance of undeserving patent claims." Another goal is to make USPTO "more accountable and transparent to the technology community," she added. Supporters of Peer-to-Patent may be the first example of social networking being used in a government application. "It brings the strength of the community to the patent examination process," said HP's Rose. "So the examiners can make the best examination they can, which ultimately results in better patents." In the first week, IBM's patent application in the pilot, called "database staging area read-through or forced flush with dirty notification," has generated four claims of prior art as well as some discussion on a message board attached to the application. Peer-to-Patent allows the public to discuss patent applications and upload examples of prior art. Then, members of the site select the top examples of prior art for each patent application and the top 10 are forwarded to USPTO. One advantage for companies using the pilot is that they will have their patents reviewed within a year, instead of the traditional four-year waiting period. Under Noveck's original proposal, inventors who decided not to use the Peer-to-Patent review would get patents that were valid for a shorter length of time than those who used Peer-to-Patent, but that's not part of the pilot. The pilot has gained praise from some members of the open-source software community, in addition to large tech vendors. Bad patents hurt open-source and free software projects partly because those projects often aren't part of prior art searches at the USPTO, said Pamela Jones, founder and editor of Groklaw , a Web site focused on open-source and free software legal issues. No open-source and free software prior art database exists, and it's now nearly impossible to write major new software packages without getting into a patent dispute, Jones said on a video on the Peer-to-Patent site. "I think of this project as spraying insecticide on stupid patents before they can multiply," Jones added. "And your knowledge of prior art is the bug spray."
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eBay's latest auction trend may give the company a major headache.
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EBay has reported that it has been having trouble with its PayPal online payment arm. The company says that it has been having technical glitches following a coding update last Thursday.
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Wireless vendor Symbol Technologies Inc. has told us it will be seeking a big license fee from all Wi-Fi equipment vendors for an infringed patent. And according to one manufacturer, Proxim Corp., it stands a good chance of getting it.
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A US appeal court has delivered a mixed ruling in a patent dispute between Research in Motion (RIM) and NTP. It upholding a decision that RIM had infringed on patents held by NTP, but cancelled an injunction
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The U.S. technology industry has faced dozens of lawsuits by &quot;patent speculators&quot; in recent years, and it&#39;s time for Congress to fix problems with the patent system, Intel&#39;s general counsel said Monday.In the last 21 months, U.S. technology vendors have contended with 193 patent infringement lawsuits, and 70 percent of them came from patent speculators -- &quot;people who buy up patents for the purpose of litigating them,&quot; said Bruce Sewell, Intel&#39;s executive vice president and general counsel, at a patent forum.By contrast, companies in the pharmaceutical industry have been defendants in 28 patent infringement lawsuits during the same stretch, and 24 of those lawsuits have been between competitors, he said.Patent lawsuit reform is needed to fix the problem with patent speculators -- called patent trolls by some people -- Sewell said, speaking at a&#160;patent reform&#160;forum in Washington, D.C. Patent reform legislation pending in the U.S. Senate doesn&#39;t target legitimate inventors, he said.&quot;We&#39;re not talking about individual inventors who sue for patent infringement,&quot; Sewell said. &quot;We&#39;re talking about patent speculators who warehouse patents and use those patents to go after successful companies.&quot;But Hans Sauer, associated general counsel at the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), called the Patent Reform Act, a version of which&#160;passed the House of Representatives&#160;in September, a &quot;very patent-hostile bill.&quot; In the Senate, the bill has&#160;stalled over objections&#160;from the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, as well as inventors and some labor unions.The House version of Patent Reform Act, supported by several large tech vendors including Microsoft and IBM, would allow courts to change the way they assess damages in patent infringement cases. Currently, courts generally consider the value of the entire product when a small piece of the product infringes a patent; the bill would allow courts to base damages only on the value of the infringing piece.&quot;Not all patents are identical,&quot; Sewell said. &quot;Some patents are more important in a product, and some patents are less important.&quot;The bill would also allow a new way to challenge patents within one year after they&#39;ve been granted.Changes in the way patents are enforced could hurt innovation, Sauer said. The bill could diminish incentives for the health industry to innovate in the coming years, he said.&quot;Will I, 30 years from now, pay $10 less for an iPod and have a 10 percent less chance that Alzheimer&#39;s medicine will be available?&quot; he said.It is difficult to predict the effects of the patent reform legislation, added Anat Hakim, a patent lawyer with Foley &amp; Lardner, the law firm that sponsored the patent forum.Sewell complained that there&#39;s a small &quot;cottage industry&quot; of patent speculators that have sprung up. &quot;The concern is that we don&#39;t end up encouraging another cottage industry,&quot; Hakim said.The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on several patent questions in recent years, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is instituting new rules later this year, Sauer noted. Adding a patent overhaul bill on top of those changes is &quot;a lot to happen at once,&quot; he said.But Sewell said the changes are needed for the IT industry, if not biotech. &quot;You have a group of companies that are happy with the status quo, and are saying, &#39;Don&#39;t change it; it&#39;s not broken,&#39;&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s fine, but it&#39;s broken for a lot of other people.&quot;