Bio, the Biotechnology Industry Organization is live blogging from BIO 2008 on their roadshow blog Bio on the Road. Here's some photos from the exhibition floor.

Patent Docs Kevin Noonan, Donald Zuhn, and Sherri Oslick are also be attending here as part of the MBHB contingent at booth #4320 where they're inviting readers of their blog to stop by and talk a little biotech patent law.

Patent Attorney Steven Albainy-Jenei from Frost Brown Todd LLC is working  the conference floor, handing out iPods courtesy of Patent Baristas -- swag! He says, "You couldn’t swing a dead cat at the BIO2008 conference today without smacking at least one governor out pressing the flesh and showing their state’s support for the biotech industry." California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking this opportunity to welcome these 20,000 visitors to San Diego for BIO 2008.

Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Visto "threw in the towel,'' Ronald Dimock, a lawyer for RIM, told Bloomberg News. "There is no settlement.''

The two companies must still agree on a royalty payment plan, Dimock said.

On the heels of that patent litigation win, Research in Motion has now filed a preemptory lawsuit in Texas against the patent licensing outfit based in Germany that's suing many cell phone manufacturers, alleging infringements of hundreds of patents it holds and seeking license settlements.

IP Com GmbH & Co. is not associated in any way whatsoever with  IP.com Inc.

Now, according to the latest news reports, RIM, maker of the new BlackBerry Bold smartphone, also asked the court to issue an injunction preventing IP Com from using the patents to sue RIM for infringement.

IP Com has countersued RIM in Germany, IP Com managing director, Cristoph Schoeller, told Dow Jones. He didn't provide details of the suit.

IP Com had been negotiating a license agreement with RIM when RIM filed its lawsuit, Schoeller said. "We thought we were in negotiations," he said, adding that he believes RIM may be trying to intimate IP Com.

Maybe, like Sun Microsystem's General Counsel Mike Dillon, the patent lawyers representing RIM think that the best offense...is a good defense.

Taken at face value, entering posts on the blog is very easy. It looks like an online word processor which enables you to publish your articles and make them available online as well as manage a few options and features. However, this is a lot more complex than you think. Not necessarily from a technical point of view, but certainly from an Internet writing skills point of view.

If you'd like someone to simplify the complexities of company blogs, there's probably no better overview of corporate blogging than an article on Marketing & Innovation that is divided into three blog posts on the golden rules for corporate blogging.

The first post in the series is a general introduction to blogging for companies.

The second post raises some preliminary questions: "What is the objective of this blog?  Is it about awareness?  Is it intended for you to share knowledge with the community?  Is it there to show that your corporation and its experts are particularly good at something?"

The third posts lists some of the "do's and don'ts" of writing on a corporate blog.

How are we doing?

When we started this blog at IP.com Inc., CEO Tom Colson wrote here:

What we're doing at IP.com might not change the world (or maybe it will) and we certainly don't position our company at the center of the universe, but it's probably not an exaggeration to say we're changing the world of intellectual property.

In our little corner of the online world, there's a lot happening with patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, and a lot of relevant stuff is being said on interesting blogs by people who really know what they're talking about. So we're joining the conversation, and blogging about how innovation is managed by corporations with a vested interest in their Intellectual Property.

Is there something in particular you'd like to discuss here? We'll keep an eye on the comments below this post where readers can give us some feedback on how we can make our company blog more interesting and helpful. Ask questions. Let us know what you think. Tell us how we can improve. We won't publish every rant and rave (we do read all of them) but if you've got some constructive criticism or helpful advice for our blog, we'd really love to hear from you.

[Cass] developed a new chart for the Fortune 500 business blogging wiki. The chart shows the average scores for reviews conducted on Fortune 500 companies that are running a corporate blog.

You can review the chart on the about this wiki section of the website.

Using the businessandblogging.com methodology for reviewing blogs, which is a system of eight review factors to give a total of 80 potential points for assessing a company's blog,

Heaven forbid anyone might apply such rigorous analysis to our corporate blog, but at least that gives us some high standards to aspire to. We've long been fans of the blogs at Sun Microsystems, led by CEO Jonathan Schwartz. When we launched this corporate blog for IP.com Inc., I wrote about why we believe in business blogs, mentioning Sun blogs as leading examples of what we hope to achieve with this new medium for corporate communications. So we were especially interested when John Cass reported on PR Communications that one of the Fortune 500 blogs reviewed was Jonathan Schwartz's Blog.

Nigel Vanderford reviews the CEO of SUN Microsystem's blog, Jonathan Schwartz. Nigel gave Jonathan's blog high marks, 68 out of 80. He liked the frequency of posting, engaging writing and interactiveness with the rest of the blogging community. Nigel discovered Schwartz comments on other blogs.

I would have given Jonathan's Blog even higher marks--because his blog makes me aware of how much I have yet to learn about blogging. Hopefully, my team and I can learn from the good example set by Jonathan Schwartz and other senior executives like Mike Dillon who blog at Sun.

The goal isn't to get everyone at Sun contributing online, it's to become part of the industry conversation. So, if you are going to write, look around and do some reading first, so you learn where the conversation is and what people are saying. Remember the Web is all about links; when you see something interesting and relevant, link to it; you'll be doing your readers a service, and you'll also generate links back to you; a win-win.

That's what we like to do in our Quick Links in the sidebar to the left, where we share interesting blogs and articles we've found. We're learning, and sharing.

With increased pressure from the West and the World Trade Organization, China has instituted a number of reforms to its patent system. Much like the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“PTO”), China has a centralized intellectual property office, known as the State Intellectual Property Office ("SIPO"), which processes patent applications, grants patents, and enforces patents in China. At first blush, the patent system and SIPO seem to be modern and in tune with the concepts and protections found in Western patent systems. Unfortunately, the actual functioning of the patent system in China is far different from its official representation of performance.

The article goes on to make a comparison with the United States patent process. The author concludes, "No protection is foolproof. However, understanding the limitations and risks involved when producing products or components in China can help a company understand the costs of doing business in China and limit its exposure to the loss of patent rights."

IP.com Inc. is providing technologies to companies and organizations to help secure their inventions and innovations in China, where the company's Executive Vice President,  Asia Pacific, Johnson Kong, is now meeting with clients in Hong Kong. Here on our company blog, Johnson will be discussing the special needs of businesses and companies securing innovation in Asia.

Tom Petrocelli, Senior Vice President for Enterprise Software at IP.com Inc., is also travelling on business in Asia. While he writes on this blog about company business, he's also writing a personal blog Tom's Technology Take, where he reports in this weekend from Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Speaking of language translation, we note this recent announcement:

The State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) has launched a free online machine translation service for patent information searchers. The Chinese-to-English translation engine, launched on 25 April 2008, was developed by SIPO and the China Patent Information Center (CPIC). The service supports Chinese patent documents and utility models and allows English language searching for bibliographic data and abstracts of published Chinese patent documents. The machine-translation engine is now open to the public for testing.

In addition, SIPO's Intellectual Property Publishing House (IPPH) has launched an English version of their "China Intellectual Property Net" (CNIPR) website, which includes a new search tool, "C-Pat Search" and offers the possibility for a machine translation.

In the weeks and months ahead, our clients and friends will be able to read more about the business of IP.com Inc. in Asia, and we'll even be blogging in Chinese languages some of our executives are fluent in -- more fluent in Chinese than in blogging, perhaps, so bear with us while we get this blog up to speed for our readers in Asia.

We urge our readers around the world to give generously to the victims of the recent earthquake disaster. Here's an excellent China Earthquake Donation Guide, recommended by our friends at the China Law Blog.

IP.com Inc. will be represented at two of those upcoming conferences:

May 28-30, 2008 - PharmaBiotech IP Summit (Worldwide Business Research) - Philadelphia, PA

June 17-20, 2008 - BIO International Convention (Biotechnology Industry Organization) - San Diego, CA

In addition to introducing InnovationQ to many prospective clients like these, hopefully, we'll get a chance during these conferences to meet with outstanding bloggers like  the Patent Docs and get together over coffee with the Patent Baristas. If you're going to be attending one of these upcoming conferences and would like to meet up while we're there, contact us and we'll set something up.

As a result of this new traffic to IP Newsflash from IP.com, our website has risen rather quickly in the list of the top links that send visitors to this handy intellectual property news portal.

The list features websites that link to IP Newsflash and have sent visitors to IP Newsflash within the last four months. The rank is determined by the visitors that use these links. The number in the column 'visits' shows, how many visitors since 20th June 2004 came from this website.

To be featured on this list, you may simply link to IP Newsflash. IP Newsflash will automatically detect the link and store it in a database. Every visitor that uses your link counts toward your rank. The more visitors click on the link on your website, the higher your rank will be.

Thanks to Rolf Claessen, who created IP Newsflash, for sending a good number of his visitors to us, as well. We really appreciate all the new visitors to IP.com who have discovered our company from links on IP Newsflash.

InnovationQ helps companies safeguard their intellectual property, derive more value from ideas, and speed the monetization of innovation. With streamlined processes and a secure system for managing innovation, InnovationQ effectively protects and enhances intellectual property from its earliest stages.

Version 3.1 incorporates collaborative features within the InnovationQ platform. With InnovationQ, users can now efficiently communicate as a team in an environment that secures their ideas as intellectual property. Combined with the workflow engine and document management capabilities, InnovationQ delivers full-featured innovation and intellectual property management solutions.

Next month, we'll be at the PharmaBiotech IP Summit in Philadelphia.

See what's happening here at IP.com in the weeks and months ahead, and where you'll be able to meet up with us between now and the Bio International Convention in San Diego in June.

The problem is that the project includes only "patents" and not the undisclosed innovations and trade secrets within the intellectual property of companies and independent inventors that have not yet been patented. Many of those inventions might better be published now to promote the progress of science and the useful arts for a sustainable environment and ecology for the future.

To compensate for these drawbacks and make the Eco-Patent Commons as useful and powerful as it can be, the initiative requires expansion to offer truly recent inventions that have not spent years in the patent application process. This involves widening the scope of the initiative to include non-patented inventions that have yet to be marketed and made public.

One way to make these inventions available is through enabled invention disclosures. An enabled invention disclosure (also called “defensive publication” or “technical bulletin”) is a written description of an invention that ideally has the same degree of detail as an issued patent. Therefore a well-written invention disclosure provides sufficient information to the reader to understand and use the invention.

Many companies successfully use enabled invention disclosures as part of their intellectual property (IP) strategies. Companies frequently have inventions that they do not wish to patent because the patent process is so expensive, including invention development costs, legal preparation and patent prosecution fees. However, companies also wish to prevent competitors from patenting those same inventions.

By using enabled invention disclosures to publish the invention, companies accomplish both goals: they save the cost of patenting but they also establish a “prior art bar” to obtaining the patent and make it impossible for competitors to claim it the invention as their own. Several Web site forums exist for publishing inventions, including www.ip.com and www.researchdisclosure.com.

The Eco-Patent Commons should be expanded to include these enabled invention disclosures. Many inventions that companies deem non-strategic for patent application and instead decide to publish may be excellent candidates to be donated to the Eco-Patent Commons. These published inventions would be truly new, fresh and useful -- a good first step to creating the true springboard for green innovation that the Eco-Patent Commons was meant to be.

We couldn't agree more.

As indicated in our original post about the Eco-Patent Commons, IP.com would really like to contribute to this very worthwhile initiative by providing the publishing platform to broaden the scope of the project to include innovations and inventions useful to the environmental movement well beyond those patents that have been contributed by the project's founding companies, some of which are already using the IP.com Prior Art Database. We've got technologies available that could very quickly take this green initiative to a whole new level of global participation.

Let's discuss.

On this day, we'd be remiss if we didn't show our appreciation for all the new readers directed to our company blog from Duncan Bucknell's IP Thinktank and David Lat's Above the Law.

Our greatest appreciation, always, is for the intellectual property law bloggers who continuously recommend our blog to their readers by adding a permanent link to Securing Innovation in their blogrolls:

• Patent Baristas
• Likelihood of Confusion
• Patent Docs
• The Invent Blog
• The Patent Prospector
• Anticipate This!
• BlawgIT
• The Legal Thing

Editor's Note: From time to time, we'll update this list to show our appreciation for bloggers who have added this blog to their blogrolls, as we become aware of links.

We'd like to take this opportunity, on blogger appreciation day, to thank patent attorney Brett Trout for including Securing Innovation in his patent meme, an excellent list of patent blogs. We really appreciate all the attention that regularly comes from that special recognition.

Finally, we'd like to thank Kevin O'Keefe and the team of weblog professionals at LexBlog for helping us develop this corporate blog for our company, IP.com. We really appreciate the extraordinary service.

Further, because most work is done electronically, you have the added burden of proving what you wrote (or created) and when you wrote it in order to establish your copyrights for unregistered material…which could represent the bulk of what you do.

IP.com created two legal safeguarding solutions specifically to help you prove the date and content of your creative work so as to ensure you will be able to leverage your copyright protection for that work. These affordable products are designed to legally safeguard your work in the context of the real world…the way you live and work. Legal safeguarding is the process of creating a digital fingerprint and date-stamp of your work, then registering that fingerprint into the public domain as public evidence of your work and thus your copyright proof. The actual creative work is never exposed to others so your privacy is ensured while you gain this valuable means of proving what you wrote and when you wrote it.

The first product is the Legal Safeguarding Agent (LSA). The LSA is a small software agent that sits on your desktop. You can direct the agent to examine specific folders and/or file types on a regular basis. When it does, the agent will determine if files are new or have been changed since the last execution. If so, it will create an archive copy of the file along with a digital fingerprint and date-stamp. The fingerprint and date-stamp (not the document itself) are automatically sent to IP.com for registration and publication. The document and the archive of the document all remain on the users desktop. This provides maximum privacy as your documents never leave your possession. It also provides the best real-world solution to writers who create work on a regular basis, and who might change, edit or revise that work on a frequent basis. The agent can also be run manually to protect specific versions of work that you might be sending out to editors or reviewers. If the archive option is turned on, it also ceates a version control-like mechanism that ensures you have multiple versions of your work saved without renaming the work each time (the agent takes care of that foryou as it creates the archive).

The second product is the Creative Registry. The Creative Registry is an online database which allows the user to upload documents for safeguarding and safekeeping. Users can log on to the IP.com Creative Registry and upload individual documents to the Registry. When they do, they are provided a Certificate of Authenticity (CoA) which includes the document fingerprint and upload date information. The user can then use the CoA to retrieve the document in the future in order to prove the authenticity of their work. Alternatively, they can use their original document to prove their work by simply re-fingerprinting that document for a legal authority. When the document reproduces the same fingerprint (which it will if it has not been changed) as registered with IP.com they will have demonstrated the original date of their work and the fact that the content has not been changed (IP.com will freely confirm the registration information for any fingerprint. i.e. the date it was recorded by IP.com, via our website) Both of the above solutions ensure that you can prove what you wrote (or created) and when, thus ensuring that you will be able to establish when your copyright protection for a specific piece of work went into effect.

The Legal Safeguarding Agent is therefore a better solution for regular use where the volume of documents or records protected could be relatively high and storing the records on the user machine is desirable or at least not a problem (do you back up your work?). The Creative Registry is a better solution for low volume work or where the user wants to have the document stored by a trusted third party.

Both solutions help you prove the date and content of your work, irrefutably. Both solutions help ensure you can enjoy the protection of US copyright laws without the authenticity of your work being questioned.

Protecting your “work in progress” is an excellent idea and allows you to send it to others for comment, review or consideration, without fear that somehow they will steal your work and present it as their own. Using IP.com legal safeguarding solutions, you will always be able to prove that you had the work prior to the time it was shared. And when it comes time to publish or sell your work, or otherwise memorialize it in a final way, you can always register the final work with the Library of Congress.

Fundamentally, the stuff we call "intellectual property" is just knowledge - ideas, words, tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets, databases. This stuff is similar to property in some ways: it can be valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot of money and labour into its development to realise that value.

Tom Bell calls it "Intellectual Privilege" in a book he's writing under the title Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good, a draft of which is now available on his blog with the same title, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Someone else calls it "Imaginary Property" in the comments on this post by Professor Lawrence Lessig about Tom Bell on "Intellectual Privilege".

We don't have strong feelings one way or another what you call it, as long as it's IP.

In the business of intellectual property (IP) protection, the first rule is to establish the date on which a new idea was conceived. Conventional wisdom for establishing this date is to write up a short IP disclosure, seal it in an envelope, and mail it to yourself. The US Postal Service postmark legally establishes the date on which the IP within the envelope was created.

Conventional wisdom, or urban myth?

In an article headlined "Who's Idea Is This Anyway?" published several years ago, BusinessWeek discussed with intellectual property attorneys Nadine Jacobson and Allison Strickland the pitfalls of protecting ideas:

Q: How do entrepreneurs get into trouble with copyright, patent, or trademark issues?

Strickland: I think for one thing, they listen to the urban myths that circulate. There's one that says if you write out an idea and put it in an envelope and mail it to yourself, it's copyrighted, and anyone else who uses it is infringing. That's widely believed.

Another one says that as long as you don't take more than 25% or 30% of someone else's work, you're not infringing. But neither of those things is necessarily true.

The problem is that IP concepts are confusing and somewhat sophisticated. It's a very confusing part of the law and easy to misunderstand. The safest thing for entrepreneurs to do is to step back from what they think they know and consult reliable sources to get a reality check.

Jacobson: A lot of times, people who are starting up new businesses are concerned about keeping costs down, and they don't want to hire lawyers. So they go to a family friend or a corporate lawyer who dabbles in IP and get free advice, but it's not exactly accurate.

The blogging engineer is confused now, apparently applying an urban myth about establishing the earliest date of composition of song lyrics in which an aspiring songwriter claims copyright, and confusing that with defensive publication of a technical disclosure of a potentially patentable invention.

Patents are incredibly useful tools in that they give the inventor the right to exclude others from making, using or selling the patented invention. However, this exclusive right must be enforced. If someone is using an invention for which you have a patent, you can sue for infringement to reclaim damages, as well as force the offending party to stop. Unless you initiate the infringement proceedings (or the threat of infringement proceedings), there is nothing to make the offending party stop using your innovation. In essence, patents only have power if you are willing to stand up in court to defend them.

The problem is that obtaining patents is not a trivial process. Legal fees, filing fees, maintenance fees, and lost time by your R&D staff can be quite costly. Spending this kind of money on a powerful innovation that can return hundreds or thousands of times the investment is clearly worth it. Yet, only a small portion of the items from a typical invention review qualify as such. More often, the majority of ideas that result from an invention review are good ideas that, for one reason or another, do not end up patented.

Why?

Typically, there are a number of inventions on which you may already have partial patent protection. Inventions that improve upon an existing patented invention are good examples. Another reason you may not wish to obtain patent protection on a good idea is that you don't expect to ever gain back the money that would be spent pursuing the patent. This is highly typical for inventions that improve the operation of some aspect of your business, but are not part of your general business strategy. (A computer chip manufacturer that finds a better way of packaging would be a good example. Packaging sales are not part of the core business, and most likely patents in this area would never be pursued.)

So what happens to the innovation I don't patent?

Typically, nothing. You are free to use your invention without a patent ... until someone else patents the idea. That's when the problem occurs. At this point, they could force you into paying licensing fees, or to stop using the innovation altogether. In essence, forcing you to stop using an idea you had first, but never patented.

If I had the idea first, doesn't that give me the right to use it?

Unfortunately, having the idea first doesn't do anything for you. The only way to prevent another patent from issuing, or defeating one that has already issued, is by being able to prove not only that the idea already existed, but that it was available to the public as well. This is where technical disclosure comes in. Innovation you do not patent is at risk of being patented by others. Publishing that innovation establishes a clear trail of evidence that you had this idea, and made it available to the public. Therefore, it should be considered "general knowledge" by the patent examiners, and not be allowed to be patented. In effect, allowing you to retain your right to use your own innovation, without the hassle and expense of obtaining patent protection.

Mailing yourself a written record of an idea does not prove that the idea was available to the public. To establish that an idea was available to the public as of a date certain that can be accepted as evidence by a court of competent jurisdiction, an inventor can defensively publish a technical disclosure of the invention in the Prior Art Database, which is accessible by patent examiners at the USPTO and other patent jurisdictions.

Given the compelling reasons for publishing your technical disclosures, it's not a question of whether to publish, but rather a question of where to publish. IP.com's online publishing services are the fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective way to release your innovation to the public. However, many people are skeptical of the validity of electronic publications and their status in the courts.

What is the opinion of the USPTO regarding electronic documents?

A white paper by the United States Patent and Trademark Office states that "An electronic publication, including an on-line database or Internet publication, is considered to be a "printed publication" within the meaning of 35 U.S.C. 102(a) and (b), provided the publication was accessible to persons concerned with the art to which the document relates."

Does IP.com have an independent legal opinion of the service?

The legal opinion on IP.com's publication process by McDermott, Will & Emery states that "Based on the above analysis, it is our opinion that invention disclosures made available on IP.com's website can be authenticated, satisfy the hearsay rule or the business records exception, and satisfy the requirement of an original in a patent infringement action in federal district court in connection with an assertion of invalidity under 35 U.S.C. §§ 102 and/or 103." (read the entire document - 70Kb PDF)

What steps does IP.com take to ensure document longevity?

In addition to the online maintenance of disclosures, IP.com publishes a monthly printed (i.e. paper-based ' non-electronic) publication, The IP.com Journal, which is available to libraries worldwide. The presence of The IP.com Journal in libraries means that not only do you not need to fear the "electronic-only" publication, but it provides publicly accessible archive copies in the instance the IP.com database becomes unavailable online.

With the launch of the Eco-Patent Commons earlier this week, four companies -- IBM, Nokia, Pitney-Bowes and Sony -- joined with the World Business Council on Sustainable Development to do something almost unprecedented: they agreed to relinquish their control over inventions that could benefit the planet in order to spur innovation for the greater good.

Thus begins the transcript of a very interesting podcast interview with IBM's Vice President of Environmental Affairs, Wayne Balta, on GreenBiz Radio.

Wayne Balta: The Eco-Patent Commons is a first of its kind initiative under which we at IBM and some other like-minded companies are partnering with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development to create a place where patents related to the environment can be pledged by the patent holder so that others around the world can access them and use them free of charge.

The basic premise here is that in the environmental arena, sharing knowledge and technology has the great potential to better address the world's problems. That there exists no organized way today to do this on a global basis. That leading businesses may hold patents that are not an essential source of business income to them. And that by sharing them with others on a global basis, both developed and developing countries, it can help people develop in a more sustainable way. And for those who pledge the patents it might also need to lead to new opportunities for innovation and collaboration with others, whom you might not otherwise reach.

...you know, pledging patents for free use by others is not necessarily a common way companies think about their portfolio of intellectual property and we at IBM recognize that. Now, we at IBM probably have as much or more experience as anyone with this because we have also done prior patent pledges. So we recognize that as we've spoken to others about the idea that it isn't something that you're innately thinking of doing. But as people think through the best use of some of this IP and the opportunities that could come out of a commons like the one we're creating, many have realized and others I believe will realize that it can be a win-win situation.

It can be a win for innovators in other parts of the world, who might look at these ideas and further them and use them as the basis of additional solutions. And it can be a win for those who pledge because it could open up opportunities to collaborate with people that you might not otherwise have collaborated with.

In a joint press release, other member companies of the Eco-Patent Commons today issued the following statements:

Donal O’Connell, Director of Intellectual Property, Nokia, said, “Environmental issues have great potential to help us discover the next wave of innovation because they force us all to think differently about how we make, consume and recycle products. From Nokia we have pledged a patent designed to help companies safely re-use old mobile phones by transforming them into new products like digital cameras, data monitoring devices or other electronic items. Recycling the computing power of mobile phones in this way could significantly increase the reuse of materials in the electronics industry.”

Angelo Chaclas, Vice President & Deputy General Counsel, Intellectual Property and Technology Law at Pitney Bowes, said, “The Eco-Patent Commons offers an effective framework to develop and make available technology that helps combat climate change and reduce the release of carbon dioxide. Our objective for the Eco-Patent Commons is to promote the spread of environmentally conscious technologies that make conservation and preservation a priority.”

Hidemi Tomita, General Manager of Sony Corporation’s Corporate Social Responsibility Department, said, “To more effectively protect the environment, it is time for business to join efforts rather than tackling the issue alone. We truly believe this joint effort with our peers will mark a significant step and help transfer innovative ideas and technologies across industries and beyond to developing countries. We are excited to launch this platform to share technologies that will bring about positive changes in the environment.”

These ideas are exemplary of a new wave of thinking described in a recent blog post on Open Innovators. "Companies need to get a lot better at bringing external ideas and knowledge in from the outside, while at the same time allowing internal ideas not being used to flow outside the organization."

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) is a CEO-led, global association of some 200 companies dealing exclusively with business and sustainable development. The Council provides a platform for companies to explore sustainable development, share knowledge, experiences and best practices, and to advocate business positions on these issues in a variety of forums, working with governments, non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations. Members are drawn from more than 35 countries and 20 major industrial sectors.

Get the FAQs and download the Brochure of the Eco-Patent Commons in pdf here.

At IP.com Inc., we'd like to get involved in support of the Eco-Patent Commons project to expand this initiative to include the sharing of innovative ideas and technologies that directly or indirectly protect the environment, which have not yet been patented but are otherwise in the prior art and knowledge of the member corporations, the scientific community, and academia.

IP.com's Prior Art Database technology could be made readily available, free of charge, as a customized repository of  global innovation in support of the Eco-Patents Commons. How amazing would that be?

Patent Troll Tracker blogged about the news of this massive lawsuit, reported by Heise Online as follows:

IPcom, an exploiter of patents based in Pullach, near Munich, is demanding 12 billion euros from the Finnish group Nokia for use of mobile telephony patents, reports Handelsblatt. IPCom is said to have lodged a complaint with the Land Court in Mannheim in early January, aimed at prohibiting Nokia's use of eight patent families. That would mean a ban on sales in a large number of countries, though what particular patents are involved is not yet clear.

The IPCom boss, Christoph Schoeller, said negotiations on the licensing of the patents had been going on for a long time, and now his firm's patience was at an end. The Nokia group is reported to be rejecting the claims, asserting that some of the patents are invalid and the fees being claimed are excessive.

News of this multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Nokia by the German-based company, which press reports sometimes refer to as simply IPCom or IP-Com, provoked commentary in The Motley Fool article headlined Have Patent, Will Sue:

No one expects reforms to happen overnight. Particularly when the U.S. government and the entire tech industry deal with the tangled nuances of patent law, positive changes in the system will naturally be slow in coming.

But in the meantime, companies continue to use and abuse patent rights to go after competitors -- or after any entity with deep enough pockets. While many of the industry's larger players, such as Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) and Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM), are tangled in more legitimate beefs over patent infringement related to their products, some companies employing only a few lawyers and developing no products continue to sue indiscriminately.

And the cost of damages seems to know no limits. The industry marveled at the $612 million Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) ended up paying to scrappy patent prosecutor NTP, but that's nothing compared with what some are asking for. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) recently got slapped with a lawsuit demanding -- get this -- at least $17.7 billion. The complainant in this case is a German company called IP-Com, bankrolled by Fortress Investment Group (NYSE: FIG).

Our company, IP.com Inc., based in the USA, should not be confused with any other company using a similar name. Information about our company, which serves many leading companies with tools to protect and secure their intellectual property assets, can be found on our corporate website at www.ip.com.

IP.com was founded to fill a growing void in the tools available to the intellectual property community. Our initial product, the IP.com Prior Art Database, was created to provide companies with a fast and effective, centralized outlet for publishing and searching technical disclosures. Since its inception, the IP.com Prior Art Database has continued to grow, attracting high profile clients such as IBM, General Electric, Motorola, Abbott Laboratories, and Eastman Kodak (to name a few).

In our process of developing the Intellectual Property Prior Art Database, we have built a rock-solid, easy-to-use, legally-defensible method for providing verifiable date-stamps and ensuring the integrity (proving they haven't been altered) of electronic files. This technology has become the cornerstone of IP.com's service offerings. We have extended our product line to allow corporations to utilize our innovative file protection (safeguarding) methods on their own private (internal) data using the IP.com Innovation Q or the online IP.com Creative Registry.

The IP.com Innovation Q product combines the legal safeguarding processes along with secured-access search and retrieval to provide a complete solution for safeguarding, searching, and archiving your sensitive data (such as R&D lab notebooks).

Journalists are welcome to contact the CEO of IP.com, Thomas J. Colson, a registered patent attorney, for more information about the company, to get a quote or comment, or to arrange an interview about current issues in patent litigation and intellectual property management for innovative companies.

For us, and the people we do business with, our company website is an important part of our corporate communications media, and we knew that blogging would bring even more attention to what we do for our clients. So our blog would have to be professional. Getting a blog started using Blogger, Movable Type, or WordPress is so easy anyone can be blogging in minutes using one of those familiar templates. We wanted something more professional, something designed just for us. Our own corporate blog.

We looked at a lot of blogs that focus on intellectual property, our business, and really liked the professional blogs developed by LexBlog for these lawyers:

• Chicago IP Litigation Blog
• Contemporary Intellectual Property, Licensing & Information Law
• Maryland Intelllectual Property Law Blog
• Patent Trademark Blog
• IP Law Chat
• The IP Law Blog
• Australian Trade Marks Law Blog
• Intellectual Property Law Blog
• IP Litigation Blog
• The IP ADR Blog

• Write for Clients by business writer and communications consultant Lori Herz
• Corvette Blog by George Matick Chevrolet
• Blog Crystal for the Crystal Mountain Ski Area
• eDiscovery Source by RenewData
• True Gotham by The Heddings Property Group
• The Retirement Plan Blog by National Benefit Services
• The Farm at Tralee Journal about Tennessee Equestrian Real Estate
• Pension Risk Matters published by Pension Governance
• The Adventure of Strategy by Rob Millard
• Business Memory Blog

On our Securing Innovation blog, here, in particular, we love using the Quick Links feature to share with our readers, and our employees at IP.com, lots of links to other blogs and articles of interest to those in our business, which we find when reading their blogs in our feed reader. Speaking of which, if you want to pick up our Quick Links selections in your feed reader, there's a separate RSS feed for that column, in addition to our regular blog feed. How cool is that?

We hope you like what we're doing here on our new corporate blog, with the help of the team of professional weblog developers at LexBlog. We really owe them one. Did we mention they're fun to work with? Ask anyone who has.

Conspicuously absent from that blog cabal are Sun and IBM, each with thousands of  employees who blog, and strong corporate commitments to blogging evident from notes on their respective company websites here:

Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. We need to do a better job of telling the world. As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first (but please do read and follow the advice in this note). Blogging is a good way to do this.

and here:

As they'll tell you themselves, the opinions and interests expressed on IBMers' blogs are their own and don't necessarily represent this company's positions, strategies or views. But that doesn't mean we don't want you to read them! Because they do represent lots of business and technology expertise you can't get from anyone else.

IBMer Mike Moran adds on his Biznology Blog:

Many other companies use blogs to connect better with their customers through blogs. Blogs that are written by living breathing employees, not the PR department.

Our new corporate blog, Securing Innovation, was conceived by us as a group blog, with posts by all our employees who want to write articles and blog about their work for the company. As well, some of our executives have their own personal blogs about their special interests and expertise. Tom Petrocelli,  our Senior Vice President for Enterprise Software, has his own blog, Tom's Technology Take, where he shares his thoughts about a wide range of technology issues beyond those he writes about here on the company blog.

IP.com is not a large corporation with hundreds and thousands of employees, but more than a few great ones, and we count among our clients many of these large companies that are developing best practices in corporate blogging. Like them, we're pretty much learning as we blog, and hoping to get better with experience in this engaging new medium for corporate communications.

Tom Mighell is Senior Counsel and Litigation Technology Support Coordinator at  Cowles & Thompson in Dallas.  In addition to his busy law practice, Tom publishes the Internet legal research and technology weblog  Inter Alia and is the current Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2008, among other things.

Speaking of IP.com's new corporate weblog, Tom says, "Great blog -- give it a look."

w00t!

A couple of his pointers make sense to me, now that we're blogging.

1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share.

That's what we do here on Securing Innovation in a special section called Quick Links in the sidebar to the left of our posts. Now that we're up and running with our corporate blog, I see how important this feature is, and how right Kevin O'Keefe of LexBlog was when he advised us that we'd probably appreciate the Quick Links on our corporate blog even more than our own posts here.

Quick Links is where we share with our readers all the interesting stuff we discover surfing the web each day. And that's what Barger is getting at when he says his "intent for weblogs in 1997 was to make the web as a whole more transparent, via a sort of "mesh network," where each weblog amplifies just those signals (or links) its author likes best."

The other point Barger makes that really struck home with me is this:

 4. Being truly yourself is always hipper than suppressing a link just because it's not trendy enough. Your readers need to get to know you.

When we started this corporate blog, it wasn't really clear to me how much of my personal life I would share with clients and customers of IP.com Inc. beyond the business bio that outlines my professional background. As much as that corporate blurb tells readers what I do, as CEO, there's not a great deal in there about who I am, Tom Colson. It's not easy to talk personally on a website, but I'm learning that blogging is more like having a conversation with readers than writing articles in business journals. So, I'll begin this blog conversation as I would with new friends, by introducing you to the girls in my life and a girl named Pants.

Take, for example, all the people who blog at Sun Microsystems, including CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who has his own blog. We think they've got it right.

Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. We need to do a better job of telling the world. As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first (but please do read and follow the advice in this note). Blogging is a good way to do this.

Advice By speaking directly to the world, without benefit of management approval, we are accepting higher risks in the interest of higher rewards. We don't want to micro-manage, but here is some advice.

It's a Two-Way Street The real goal isn't to get everyone at Sun blogging, it's to become part of the industry conversation. So, whether or not you're going to write, and especially if you are, look around and do some reading, so you learn where the conversation is and what people are saying.

If you start writing, remember the Web is all about links; when you see something interesting and relevant, link to it; you'll be doing your readers a service, and you'll also generate links back to you; a win-win.

What we're doing at IP.com might not change the world (or maybe it will) and we certainly don't position our company at the center of the universe, but it's probably not an exaggeration to say we're changing the world of intellectual property.

In our little corner of the online world, there's a lot happening with patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, and a lot of relevant stuff is being said on interesting blogs by people who really know what they're talking about. So we're joining the conversation, and blogging about how innovation is managed by corporations with a vested interest in their Intellectual Property.

Find the conversation. Join it. Contribute to it. "Conversing is how we learn. It's how we network. It's how we grow as professionals," says Kevin O'Keefe, CEO of LexBlog, whose team of experts guided us in the development of our corporate blog, "Blogging is a conversation. Not only do you learn and grow your reputation by joining in, you will not be conspicuous by your absence."

Blog well, and own the conversation.

If you're interested in learning more about IP.com, Inc. and why we blog, you may want to read our first post here.