Category: Patent

By Posted on Posted in Blog, Copyright, Patent, Trademarks No Comments

When lawyers say that hard cases make bad law, they usually mean that extreme or unusual circumstances provide poor basis for making legal rule that would have to be applicable to a wider range of more common cases. Sometimes the phrase describes cases that involve a party whose hardship draws sympathy even if its legal case is weak. But sometime hard cases can make good law, when they present smart judges with difficult dilemmas and force them to think hard and deep on their ruling and its broader consequences. Yet courts don’t always choose the cases that come before them …

Google v. Equustek: Unnecessarily Hard Cases Make Unnecessarily Bad Law Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Blog, Patent 3 Comments

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced yesterday that it “has throttled a notorious patent used to wrongfully demand payment from cities and other municipalities that use tracking systems to tell transit passengers if their buses and trains are on time.” According to the EFF, “The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has drastically narrowed the patent owned by ArrivalStar after EFF filed a formal request to reexamine the patent’s legitimacy with the help of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at Berkeley Law. The ArrivalStar patent had been used as the basis for dozens of lawsuits against entities …

Troll Alert: Dovden Investments / ArrivalStar Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Blog, Copyright, Featured, Patent, Trademarks 1 Comment

I was invited to participate in a two-day conference in Toronto, organized by the Conference Board of Canada. The conference’s title is Business Innovation Summit 2013: Innovation for the Corporation. I was asked to be on a panel debating the following hypothetical motion: “IP Protection Should Be Strengthened to Stimulate Innovation and Commercialization.” Arguing for the motion were Sheldon Burshtein, a partner at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP, and  Mark Fleming, Director, Federal Affairs and Health Policy, Janssen Inc. Canada. Sam Trosow and I were invited to argue against it. And we did. Before our debate began, the organizers distributed clickers and asked the audience to …

“IP Protection Should Be Strengthened to Stimulate Innovation and Commercialization”: Motion Denied Read more »