Posts Tagged ‘google’

Google Introduces New “Prior Art” Finder for Patent Searching

Friday, 17 August, 2012 11:33 Written by Mark Malek 0 Comments
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By: Mark R. Malek

As I was perusing my intellectual property news after traveling most of this past week, I found out about this Google’s new “Prior Art Finder” tool.  I gave it a shot and it was pretty darn cool.  In short, the tool “searches multiple sources for related content that existed at the time the patent was filed.”

Personally, I have used Google Patents to do some prior art searching in the past.  It is important for inventors to identify prior art that can be a bar to patentability.  A great way to do that is to conduct a patent search, but sometimes, a great start is to just search using the tools that are out there for free.  When you conduct a search using Google Patents, several references will be located. These references will likely be related to the invention that you are searching for. The new Google tool will allow you to identify additional sources of prior art.

I read one article that seems to indicate that the Prior Art Finder can become an Infringement Finder for patent trolls. Perhaps it may be the case, but at the very least this will allow inventors to enhance their prior art searching by viewing additional references that are related to their invention.

I am going to follow up on this article with a series of articles on patent searching, whether or not you need to do it, whether or not you should do it, and what you have to do with prior art once you find it. I will try to use this tool more in the future and let you know how my results come out.

Google Admits It Needs Apple’s Patents to Compete

Monday, 23 July, 2012 06:00 Written by Aaron B. Thalwitzer 0 Comments
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Don’t we all?

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Google General Counsel Kent Walker  has argued that proprietary non-standardized technologies that become ubiquitous due to their popularity with consumers should be considered de facto standards:

While collaborative [Standards Setting Organizations (SSOs)] play an important part in the overall standard setting system, and are particularly prominent in industries such as telecommunications, they are not the only source of standards. Indeed, many of the same interoperability benefits that the FTC and others have touted in the SSO context also occur when one firm publishes information about an otherwise proprietary standard and other firms then independently decide (whether by choice or of necessity) to make complementary investments to support that standard in their products. … Because proprietary or de facto standards can have just as important effects on consumer welfare, the Committee’s concern regarding the abuse of SEPs should encompass them as well.

Is that all the time, or only when it suits Google’s interests? Popularity and ubiquity are not (yet) enough to limit the scope of patent protection.

Google is forwarding the argument that some inventions are so good that they should be considered “standards” subject to restrictions. In a letter of his own, Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell responded. “That a proprietary technology becomes quite popular does not transform it into a ‘standard’ subject to the same legal constraints as true standards.”

Sewell wrote:

The capabilities of an iPhone are categorically different from a conventional phone, and result from Apple’s ability to bring its traditional innovation in computing to the mobile market. Using an iPhone to take photos, manage a home-finance spreadsheet, play video games, or run countless other applications has nothing to do with standardized protocols. Apple spent billions in research and development to create the iPhone, and third party software developers have spent billions more to develop applications that run on it. The price of an iPhone reflects the value of these nonstandardized technologies — as well as the value of the aesthetic design of the iPhone, which also reflects immense study and development by Apple, and which is entirely unrelated to standards.

The distinction may be in the origin of the popularity. Was it from being adopted industry-wide, or was it because one developer invented a really good technology, forcing everyone else to get on board or fall behind. Here, Apple took a cell phone, made an iPhone, and now we have the patent wars.

Apple’s argument mirrors the rationale for our patent system itself: an inventor gets property rights to an idea for a limited time, in exchange for disclosing the idea. Others can embrace and extend the invention, but only when the patent expires.

Cook argues:

No one should be able to get an injunction off a standards-essential patent because the owner of the patent has the responsibility to license it on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory manner . . . [a]nd so when somebody comes to you and tries to get some obscene level of money from you for this, they are in essence telling you they are not going to license it because they want to go try to get an injunction and use the court system to do that. In my view, they use it in a way that it wasn’t intended. … And you can always argue about the payment, and there has to be a forum for resolving those disputes. The problem in this industry is if you add up what everybody says the standards-essential patents are worth, no one else could be in the phone business. Competition would be locked out. And so it’s kind of gotten crazy — this is one issue. There is some of this that is maddening. It’s a waste; it’s a time-suck. However, does it stop innovation? It’s not going to stop us from innovating — no — but it’s overhead. It’s overhead that I wish didn’t exist.

For more, read here.

Patent Grabs Continue – Why?

Thursday, 12 April, 2012 06:00 Written by Dan Pierron 0 Comments
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The latest major acquisition of patents by a big computer software corporation has been agreed to between AOL and Microsoft.  The sticker price this time: $1.06 billion.  The purchase includes more than 800 patents, putting the per-patent price north of $1 million.  On the heels of purchases by Google, buying Motorola Mobility and its attending intellectual property, and the Nortel portfolio sale, major corporations continue building their IP war chests.  More than this, they are doing so largely by raiding the portfolios of other large companies that are either distressed or worse.  If it has its way, Kodak will be the next big seller.  The question becomes: to what end?

In the battle between tech giants, the power afforded by a patent potentially allows the owner to prevent the manufacture, import, or sale of products that infringe the invention described in the patent.  Scale this power by the thousands of patents owned by companies like Google and Apple, and the opportunity to hobble a competitor is manifest.  Hence, tech companies are tripping over themselves to amass greater and greater numbers of patents in the areas of electronics, software, and, as in the case between AOL and Microsoft, advertising.  Given the numbers of patents owned by the major players, and the complexity of a given product, it’s a safe working assumption to say that every major product released by the likes of Apple, Goole, Microsoft and others of that ilk infringe on at least one patent owned by a competitor.

So what is keeping patent owners at bay, permitting infringing products to enter the market?  Essentially, mutually-assured destruction.  Given an increasing number of patents owned by a given competitor, the probability of that competitor owning a product that one or more of your products infringes approaches 1.  If one tries to assert patent rights, that will in turn spur a counter-assertion.  This gives rise to a stand-off; although there is potentially much to be gained by excluding a competitor’s product from the marketplace, the consequences of that action could substantially outweigh the benefits.

 

Continuing the Cold War allusion, patent acquisitions like those mentioned above are tantamount to an arms race between nations.  Nobody wants to be left behind, so everyone commits more and more resources to protection.  Consortiums are even arising, akin to treaty organizations, to the chagrin of those that are excluded.  In sum, barring major changes in the philosophy in the business practices driving the tech industry, the one with the biggest patent portfolio looks to be king of the hill.

Aspiring Patent Troll Yahoo Shakes Down Facebook

Monday, 12 March, 2012 06:00 Written by Aaron B. Thalwitzer 3 Comments
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On the eve of Facebook’s heralded IPO, Yahoo is trying to shake down Facebook, demanding payment for infringement of 10-20 of its patents. Yahoo and Facebook had been buddy-buddy until Yahoo made its move, but this will at least shake things up.

Yahoo, after all, is largely irrelevant to most internet users. Aside from sending email to people who haven’t yet switched to Gmail and the occasional news article, I have not used Yahoo in years. Yahoo knows that if it can’t do an about-face now, it is on the decline. It’s only a matter of time until it is absorbed by company for essentially the value of its intellectual property (i.e., RIM, Kodak, Nokia). Seeking to reap a bid-pay day, a la the pre-IPO settlement Yahoo made with Google, whereby Google gave Yahoo 2.7 million shares in a patent settlement before the search giant’s 2004 IPO. Investors do not want the uncertainty of litigation when they buy chunks of a $100 billion company. If the prospective suit has merit – and I have no idea whether it does – Facebook will probably settle. It can afford it, and historically it has been conservative with patents, knowing that it has a relatively weak inventory of its own.

Yahoo is not keeping this a secret. On the contrary, Yahoo has told the NY Times that the two companies met, and that Yahoo, “We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights.”

Yahoo’s shareholders, who will probably get a short-term dividend, should be worried; Yahoo’s innovation ended about 10 years ago. Facebook is already ten times Yahoo’s size, and keeps innovating (for better or worse).

More analysis from a guy who called this a mile away: Techcrunch.

Terms of Service and Your Copyrights

Thursday, 26 January, 2012 07:52 Written by Scott Nyman 3 Comments
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Upon logging into my Gmail this morning, a mandatory step in my daily routine, I noticed an alert that Google is consolidating the privacy policies and terms of service for all of its various online offerings. Being in the business of law, I felt compelled to read through the changes to see how Google will handle managing information about a user.

For those that are unaware, a privacy policy generally comprises a statement from a company regarding the handling of a user’s personally identifying information. The privacy policy is typically accompanied by a terms of service, which sets out the rules a user must abide by to gain access to a service. The terms of service may often define the legal relationship between a user and a service provider, the ways in which the service may be used, and the procedure to follow in the event the terms are violated.

Of course, being an intellectual property attorney, I immediately look to see how the rights relating to user owned copyrights and other IP is handled. Google’s terms of service reads:

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

Sounds amazing, right? But, if you read on…

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps).

So, if a user posts one of his or her copyrighted materials on onc of Google’s services, the user in effect grants Google a non-revocable license to use the material, essentially, how they see fit, for “operating, promoting, and improving service, and develop new services,” a pretty broad group of categories.

This peaked my interest as to how a user’s copyrighted materials are handled on other popular social sites, such as Facebook.  Again, things start out rosy:

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings.

 But the devil is in the details:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).

To my surprise, Facebook seems to make less of a grab on your copyrighted materials than Google. Of concern, Facebook claims the right to transfer and sub-license your content. However, it appears that any and all of Facebook’s rights in your content ends upon deletion of the content from Facebook’s system by the copyright holder and those with whom the content has been shared.

As a little bonus, section 5.6 of Facebook’s terms of service states, “You will not use our copyrights or trademarks (including Facebook, the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Face, Poke, Wall and 32665), or any confusingly similar marks, without our written permission.” So, allegedly, the word “face” is now owned by Facebook. If this turns out like the Superbowl-”Big Game” situation, we may have to start referring to our faces as our “head fronts.”

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