The Dolcera Blog

Social Media and networking websites have affected the life of people in one way or the other. Simply put, we are all hooked by these websites. We at Dolcera thought that it may be interesting to make a preliminary research on the social media to find their nexus with the patenting fraternity. This blog post is mainly to share the preliminary research with our readers.

The following graph shows the IP activity over the last few years. There is certainly an upward trend since 2004 however, the year 2008 & 2009 IP activity could be marred by the Bilski repercussions on the business method patents among other reasons. It is also to be noted that 2009 data is not up to date owing to the data unavailability.

The following graph shows the IPC classes that were taken into the consideration while doing the search.

The following graph shows the patent assignee information in this field.

Note: The patent counts for some of the prominent social media websites are Facebook(48) and Myspace & Technorati with just less than 20 each.

Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues Harit Mohan & Samir Raiyani for their help in this exercise.

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Call them “patent terrorists” or “paten trolls” they are here to stay. It needs constant vigil and dexterity in analyzing patents to shield those companies that have no tangible assets, products or customers—just a team of lawyers who write demand letters, file lawsuits and watch the dollars roll in. And the trolls are only one of the hosts of issues in-house IP counsel are dealing with right now as IP comes to the forefront of business law. Hence the oft repeated slogan “prevention is better than cure” holds well even in this context.

A quick mention of Dolcera’s patent dashboard is worth mentioning here. The patent dashboard has served as an early warning system for the in-house legal professionals of many Fortune 500 and Global 1000 organizations.

Most of these professionals would acknowledge that the lack of prior art information has led to any patent troll case. The patent dashboard’s collaborative feature makes it possible for sharing the prior art / product clearance searches within the organization.

Further, a regular analysis of patent portfolios of the known trolls within the industry and any closely-related industries can be pivotal in the prevention of a troll impact. The use of patent dashboard during the product design stage can ensure that all patents held by a known patent troll cannot be asserted in good faith against the products. In addition to this prevention measure, organizations can be well informed with the opinions on these patents held by patent trolls. Unlike many other contemporary tools, patent dashboard has been developed with active inputs from legal professionals from various organizations.

The issues sighted above are to prevent any possible attack from a patent troll; hence the need for in-house counsels to sift through a zillion patent documents and other scientific literature is well ascertained. Patent dashboard helps the legal professionals to structure the documents and also provides a solution to read only the relevant documents from the entire set. This aspect of the patent dashboard is critical for a legal professional at every strategic crossroads that seeks a very important decision.

This software has made it historical to exchange patent PDF documents through emails. Dolcera’s patent software holds all the relevant documents of the legal department in a central place for any in-house legal counsel to refer at any given time. The https enabled secure patent dashboard simply opens in any web browser. This award winning patent software helps in easy collaboration amongst geographically distributed teams inside large organizations.

“We had TMI — Too Much Information — going on here. This (Dolcera Dashboard) is a nice hybrid,” says says Michael Jaro, Chief Patent Counsel, Medtronic.

This patent analysis software aka patent dashboard has more to it. The rating and tagging feature of the document makes the future references of a document easy. The drag and drop feature further enhances the usability of the software.

“We have specific futuristic road-map carved out for the patent dashboard so that the lives of patent attorneys are made easy. At Dolcera, we believe that the current version of the patent dashboard is the first step towards making robust patent software” says Samir Raiyani, CEO of Dolcera.

The use of patent dashboard as described by one of the power users Mr Jaro himself “Each month, the Internet-based dashboard culls recent patent grants and applications from around the world and separates them by topic into different “buckets” so attorneys with different specialties don’t have to wade through irrelevant material. The culling is a result of both an automated search algorithm and human review performed by Dolcera’s Indian employees.”

“We have many tools to choose from, but there is more information out there than any single human being can feel comfortable digesting,” Jaro says. “This is just one way we thought we could do a better job of keeping up.”

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Here is a couple of podcasts from one of our clients in the medical devices space. The topics of discussion on the podcast are as follows

1. In re Bilski impact on various industries
2. Utility value of our Patent Dashboard

Note: Click on the topics above to access the podcast file.

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“the decision of In re Bilski, wherein the Federal Circuit abandoned much of its precedent dealing with the section 101 eligibility of method claims and substituted a "machine-or-transformation" test, thus casting substantial doubt on the continued patentability of so-called "business method" inventions”

We at Dolcera started with an aim to do away with the doubt factor from the continued patentability of the business method patents. Hence, we at Dolcera conducted an in-depth analysis on In Re Bilski's impact on software, medical devices and pharma method patents. The USPTO is on the offensive since the In re Bilski verdict from the CAFC. Software companies have reported sharply higher rejection-rate from the patent office, and thousands of business method and software patents risk being invalidated because of this ruling.We have conducted an analysis of hundreds of USPTO examination reports for method patents in three areas:

a. Software,

b. Medical device and diagnostic, and

c. Pharmaceutical.

We have now established the following:

• Rejection rates for software method patents are significantly higher since the Bilski decision in October 2008
• Medical diagnostic method patents are also affected
• Pharmaceutical method patents have been impacted, but to a much lesser degree

Click here to download the Dolcera presentation at the PIUG 2009 Annual Conference

The recent federal court's verdict on the long standing patent litigation (involving the US patent 6,233,389) between the Dish Network (erstwhile Echostar - WO2008027406A1) and the digital video solutions provider Tivo has consolidated the position of NDS, a Newscorp and Permira owned company. NDS is only the second player in the same field providing digital video solutions standing second to Tivo. NDS has patents (US20090080866A1, US20080285943A1) in the field of Video Substitution or the ability to rewind, fastforward etc options on the satellite tv. Already NDS has several clients across the globe. With this court order, the position of NDS would be bolstered or subtly proclaimed that its THE alternative for the satellite TV providers across the globe to seek video solutions inorder to showcase the video subsititution features.

ICAP the world's biggest interdealer broker bought the transactions division of patent brokerage Ocean Tomo for $10 million in cash and shares.
Indeed, there is a lot of synergy between the two but on the long term horizon IMHO it would’ve been great to see Thomson Reuters buying Ocean Tomo than ICAP. No doubt ICAP has a lot of synergy in the brokerage domain but it takes more to deal with the patent brokerage. Had the buyer been Thomson Reuters then the value addition is just manifold. A combination of a patent database provider, patent brokerage firm and a media biggie Reuters would be deadly for this IP Business as a whole. However, I don’t discount the importance of the company financials that these M&A deals are clout with.

On June 28, Facebook will be allowing users to register names in their Facebook URL, replacing the existing random ID numbers. This new policy by Facebook would create tight corner situations wherein users may try to register as their user name words or phrases that could infringe on a company name, trademarked slogan, or even a broadcast station's call signs. However, yet another social rather professional network has been allowing users to choose their public profile URL. I tried googling for some interesting litigations suits on this issue but surprisingly none turned up. Well, is it trouble on the way for linkedin too?

Bloomberg reports that Novartis AG Sandoz unit was sued yet again by another company J&J over a contraceptive pill patent. This is in consequence to the last year incident where Novartis was sued by the german drug maker Baeyer over the same contraceptive pill patent. Novartis R&D / Patent Analyst team could seek answers from the video here. The methodology explained can be put to use so that such potential infringements could be avoided. However, i dont rule out any other strategies behind this entire issue.