Philip Brooks' Patent Infringement Updates

Wired!

The following is excerpted from the above-titled article by Jill Schachner Chanenerg from the print issue of the February 2010 issue of the ABA Journal:

There’s a battle about to break out on your computer screen. On the third floor of West’s sprawling corporate headquarters outside Minneapolis, a veritable army of professionals has been working for nearly five years to create a revamped Westlaw. They are changing everything from the interface users see on their PC screens to all the technology that makes it work behind the scenes.

Known as WestlawNext, the new platform will debut this month.

On its own suburban campus near Dayton, Ohio, LexisNexis—the other half of the duopoly that has ruled online legal research for almost 40 years (some call it “Wexis”)—is planning its own revamped platform. Referred to internally as New Lexis, it is slated to roll out publicly later this year on a date yet to be determined.

Both companies claim to be creating a legal research experience that will mimic the ease of use their customers have come to expect from the leading Internet search engine, Google.

The updated services come not a moment too soon, since the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine has just gotten into the legal research business. In November, the company announced that its Scholar search engine now contains more than 80 years of U.S. case law from federal and state courts, as well as U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1791—all of it free.

Read the full article, including a discussion of additional tools: Bloomberg Law and Fastcase.

PriorSmart Launches Patent and IP News Aggregator

On August 1, 2009 PriorSmart launched a patent and intellectual property news aggregator.  The website includes active tweeting with 400 followers as of last week.

The news page includes:

1. USPTO Weekly stats
2. Patent Litigations
3. Top Patent Tweets
4. Patent Blogs

Let me know what you think about this service, by posting a comment below.

Intellectual Property Contingency Consortium

I received an inquiry recently from a reader that was concerned about whether he was covering all of his legal options, but hesitant to retain an attorney.  I offered to provide him with the names of a few attorneys that handle patent infringement matters on contingency, but then yesterday I came across another possible resource.

The Intellectual Property Contingency Consortium is a group of law firms and licensing companies that assists clients - corporations and individuals - in the enforcement of patent, trademark, and copyright rights on a contingency basis.

From the West Coast to the East Coast, members of the Consortium can enforce your valuable intellectual property rights. The Consortium can scale attorney staffing up or down depending on the size of your litigation. The technical expertise of the Consortium members extends over a wide spectrum - from consumer goods to high technology.

If you would like a Consortium Law Firm Member to evaluate your case for possible representation, please email us at info@ipcontingency.com with a chronology of the events of your case, together with any relevant documents in pdf or Word format.

You should not consider a Consortium Law Firm Member to be representing you unless and until both you and the Consortium Law Firm(s) execute a written retention agreement for services.

They also offer links to companies that offer the following services:

• Damage Experts
• Liability Experts
• Prior Art Searchers
• Help in Identifying Potential Licensees & Infringers
• Litigation Tools for Winning Information

Access the Consortium and resource links here.  If you have worked with one of the Consortium law firms, please include a comment below that summarizes your experience.

Data.gov Continues to Grow

As a follow-up to my July 7, 2009 post on the federal government's launch of the Data.gov website, J. Nicholas Hoover writes in the December 21, 2009 print issue of InformationWeek that the "site has grown from just 47 data sets when introduced in May to more than 115,000 today. And the recently launched federal IT Dashboard--a display of IT project status that corporations would do well to mimic--has not only given the public visibility into the performance of Uncle Sam's big-ticket IT projects, but put agency CIOs on notice that execution matters."

Mr. Hoover continues:

Data.gov, the government's public-facing data portal, has its conceptual roots in a data repository Kundra built as CTO of Washington, D.C., and the model has now been emulated by other local, state, and even national governments. The site has been one of the highest-profile IT efforts of the Obama presidency, though it, too, is in the early stages. So far, Data.gov contains mostly "geodata" on political boundaries--voting districts, for example--a mere drop in the bucket of government information.

Kundra's push to expand the amount and types of data on Data.gov requires overcoming ingrained practices. He says resistance to change in federal agencies and departments may be the biggest obstacle he faces in delivering on the president's IT-related priorities. "One of the most difficult parts is velocity, the speed at which we need to get things done versus the organic friction that exists," he says.

"He's built this infrastructure with the IT Dashboard and Data.gov. Now he needs to make them good and have solid execution," says Clay Johnston, director of Sunlight Labs for the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit think tank pursuing open government initiatives.

Read the full article here.

Visualizing Patent Statistics by Means of Social Network Analysis Tools

The above-titled article by Christian Sternitzke, Adam Bartkowski, and Reinhard Schramm appeared in World Patent Information (Volume 30, Issue 2, June 2008, pages 115–131).  The following is an excerpt from this article:

In recent years, developments in the field of social network analysis brought up several software tools that facilitate visualization, analysis and interpretation of cooperation and citation data, explaining the relationship between technology fields (IPC classes), patent applicants, inventors, patent documents, etc. The tools furthermore allow the combination of several other types of analysis presented in an earlier paper and enhance their visualization. The present paper, in contrast, highlights some types of network analysis of patent data which extend methodologies currently deployed in practice. First, these types of network analysis allow the identification of important players in technology fields or corporations. Second, the connections among the players can be used for competitor analysis or for identifying partners for joint development projects. Third, the methodologies also allows the identification of key patents, and fourth, rivalry between players in the technology field.

Citation networks of patent documents highlight not only frequently cited patent families but also those citing other patent families extensively. In our example, the latter case relates to a patent family by Rohm. This patent family is technologically very broad, citing more than 80 patent families within the network. Nichia, who was frequently cited by this patent family, sued Rohm for infringement.

Read the complete article here.

Boliven Patent Search Site

Boliven is a free patent search site that you may find useful. It covers several patent authorities (USPTO, EPO, PCT, JPO, KIPO) plus INPADOC and includes patent file histories and assignments. It also has some graphical analytics (top assignees, top examiners, etc) that you may find interesting along with data export, bulk PDF downloads, and more.

They have also just released a set of free Boliven Web Services that may be of particular interest to you if you are a blogger. Included are a nifty patent drawings scrollbox widget, patent search RSS feeds, a handy patent search box widget (see below Tools section in left sidebar), and more, all of which can be easily added to blog posts and sidebars.

To help kick off their new web services they are going to have drawings for a new Kindle DX and some Amazon gift certificates - open to bloggers in particular. To enter in the drawing, you will just need to register and use two or more of their widgets, feeds, or links on your site for one month or more.

Take a look here.

Federal Data Going Online

J. Nicholas Hoover wrote an article in the June 8, 2009 issue of InformationWeek about the federal government's launch in May of the Data.gov website with 47 data sets.  The goal was to have 100,000 data feeds available to the public in programmable form by the middle of June.  Based on my visit to the site today, it appears they still have a long way to go, but the site currently lists 389 "raw" data sets.

Here is a brief description from the website:

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data.

Data.gov includes searchable data catalogs providing access to data in three ways: through the "raw" data catalog, the tool catalog and the geodata catalog. The "Raw" Data Catalog provides an instant download of machine readable, platform-independent datasets while the Tools Catalog provides hyperlinks to tools that allow you to mine datasets.

Access Data.gov to see for yourself.

LARGO Models Supreme Court Decision Making

I just finished reading an article by Cara J. Hayden in the print edition of the Spring issue of Pitt Magazine (electronic version will eventually post here).  The article titled, "Supreme Decisions," discusses the work of Pitt professor Kevin Ashley who has developed a software program that employs artificial intelligence to explore how the U.S Supreme Court makes decisions.  The program called Legal Argument Graph Observer or LARGO, was developed "to help law students follow and interpret complex Supreme Court debates."

Professor Ashley's research is of particular interest to me in light of the work I have done for clients using decision analysis to assist counsel and corporate executives evaluate whether to settle or ligitate cases based on defining the key potential decisions in the litigation and the associated damage value with each possible combination of decisions and outcomes.

If you do not have access to Pitt Magazine, you may learn more by viewing the presentation titled, "Largo, an ITS for Teaching Argumentationwith Hypotheticals" [Download LARGOTalk2].

Patent Buddy to Research Patent Attorneys and Agents

Joseph G. Scott, President of Patent Buddy, alerted me to his site as a "great place to research USPTO-registered attorneys, agents & their organizations."  As of today, this covers a universe of 39,259 attorneys/agents and 13,081 organizations.

Patent Buddy offers the ability to discover business development and employment opportunities in your area.  The site covers all USPTO-registered patent attorneys and agents, not just members.  The site also offers the opportunity for these individuals to create social networks or interest groups.  Patent Buddy also allows you to monitor the career moves of other attorneys and agents.  You can see their career history and a listing of their current and past colleagues.  In addition, you may update your basic profile derived from USPTO records with information on your academic qualifications, specific patent filings, licensing and litigation experience and your publications.

Learn more here.

M·CAM, Inc. Launches Patently Obvious® IP Assertion Defense Service

Charlottesville, Virginia − November 17, 2008−−Today, M·CAM, Inc. announced the Patently Obvious® assertion defense service, a rapid and cost-effective solution empowering companies to defend against patent assertions. The price range of Patently Obvious® is about 1-2% of the average IP litigation cost. M·CAM's services bring clarity through detailed information to teams considering IP litigation risks. The deliverable contains the identification of the asserted patents' status, a comprehensive report of unconsidered precedent art related to the asserted patents.

Developed and profitably used to help investors manage undisclosed patent weakness and invalidity, the Patently Obvious® service uses corporate, innovation and financial data integration and expert financial analysis to help find the optimum path to eliminating most, if not all, speculative assertions. Further, in contrast to other industry efforts, the Patently Obvious® service frequently establishes a basis for on-going freedom to operate derived from non-proprietary, public domain priority disclosures thereby reducing future costs.

Founded in 1998, M·CAM, Inc. is the international leader in creating financial solutions for the knowledge economy. M·CAM has worked for over a decade in bringing accountability and reliable risk assessment to the world of intangible risk finance.