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May 14, 2006

universities as patent trolls - part 2

Well, when you are wrong – the best thing to do is to acknowledge the error and applaud the person who pointed it out to you.

Well, kudos to Lawrence Ebert at the IPBiz blog who spent some time talking about patent trolls in a recent blog post.  With respect to my error, Lawrence kindly pointed to previous comments in print that suggested that Universities should/could be considered patent trolls.

The PHOSITA blog suggested that this might be the first time universities were suggested, in print, as possible trolls: Ahh… someone finally put into print what a lot of us patent practitioners have wondered for awhile – when would someone claim that universities are patent trolls?

Not even close...

CIO in an article entitled Has the Enemy of Patent Trolls Become One? published December 5, 2005 talks to Peter Detkin:

[CIO] Some people consider a "patent troll" to be any person or business that doesn't produce a product or service, but instead makes money from licensing and patent assertion primarily. Has the definition of the term you coined, "patent troll," changed since you coined it?

[Detkin] At best, I would say it's become a little bit more refined. My concern is that the term has now been used so broadly as to mean any plaintiff you don't like. Look at the definition you just used. Under that definition the University of California is a troll, Intel's a troll—and since I was at Intel at the time, Lord knows I wasn't trying to call myself a troll. But Intel routinely asserts patents—that it bought, that it's not practicing—against others, looking for money. IBM would be a troll. Thomas Edison would be a troll.

NAPP wrote in May 2005:

To the extent that the term [troll] is used to derogate inventors who do not develop corporate structures or manufacture products, NAPP believes that inventors who merely invent but do not manufacture products – which, after all, includes most university and government researchers – do not deserve epithets or less patent protection.

Martin Lueck wrote in September 2005:

For example, Eolas and the University of California have been berated as patent trolls since their $521 million victory against Microsoft. Lueck also stated: "I don't hear anyone saying IBM is a troll — even though they have a bunch of patents and license them. To suggest that the University of California is a patent troll is absurd — they make contributions just like corporate America, and they want to protect their intellectual property."

Separately, Michael Kanellos wrote:

Moreover, Stanford University made itself into a global powerhouse in part through licensing patents to professors and students who had start-ups. Without an exclusive license of Stanford's PageRank patents, Google wouldn't be the behemoth it is today. Though the PageRank technology was invented by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, they were Stanford students at the time, and the university owns the patents.

Posted by Douglas Sorocco at 10:01 AM.
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