To ensure success in the Intellectual Property (IP) world, attorneys need to access and incorporate the most relevant, comprehensive and up-to-date information available. LexisNexis® today announced in this press release that it is expanding the content offerings available through lexis.com® and unveiling enhancements to its PatentOptimizerTM and Global IP Law Service solutions. Additionally, LexisNexis unveiled three new online law centers to help attorneys keep abreast of the latest news in patent, trademark and copyright law.

“Intellectual property is one of the hottest, fastest-moving areas for corporate counsel and law firms alike,” said Peter Vanderheyden, vice president of Global Intellectual Property at LexisNexis. “LexisNexis continues to add content and functionality to its growing suite of IP services to ensure customers have the best tools available to protect their valuable assets.”

Consolidating two important prior art sources, LexisNexis allowed customers to have full-text access to defensive publications from both IP.com and Research Disclosure available through lexis.com. Consistent with LexisNexis prior art collections, these sources will be directly accessible in full text from TotalPatent via the lexis.com toolbar.

Research Disclosure is an international defensive publication service that’s considered one of the most significant non-patent prior art databases in the world. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) list Research Disclosure’s content on its “minimum documentation required” list.

IP.com provides companies with the tools and solutions to better manage IP and innovation records. In fact, lexis.com customers will have access to IP.com’s exclusive list of all IBM disclosures dating back to 1957.

“The integration of Research Disclosure and IP.com content allows customers to minimize the time and expense with researching, writing and registering patents on similar ideas,” said Vanderheyden. “In addition to this valuable content, we offer unique insights and interpretations through our world-class suite of authors. In fact, we’d like to recognize one of our prestigious authors, Paul McGrady, who was recently named to IP Law & Business' List of ‘Top 50 IP People Under 45.’”

LexisNexis unveiled three IP-related law centers providing news and analysis about patent, trademark and copyright law. To provide select and timely content, LexisNexis has aligned with a number of leading IP experts to provide podcasts, news and information, commentary and blogs. The law centers can be accessed at:

Patent Law Center
Trademark Law Center
Copyright Law Center

We've added these links to the IP Resources listed in the left sidebar of this blog along with many other great intellectual property blogs and websites.

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LexMonitor is a free daily review of law blogs and journals highlighting prominent legal discussion as well as the lawyers and other professionals participating in this conversation.

"Pulling from nearly 2,000 sources and 5,000 authors, LexMonitor will hopefully shine a light on the ongoing conversation among thought leaders in the law for the benefit of the legal profession and the public at large," says Kevin O'Keefe of LexBlog, whose team of weblog specialists has developed this innovative law blog news aggregator.

Those of us who appreciate IP Newsflash will want to tune in and browse the Intellectual Property Law Channel on LexMonitor as well.

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Peer-to-Patent has released a report on the results of its one-year pilot. Click here to download the full report in pdf format.

Here are the highlights of the report from a press release today:

Launched on June 15, 2007 by New York Law School Professor Beth Noveck together with a network of corporate and academic collaborators and in cooperation with the USPTO, Peer-to-Patent is the first social networking project with a direct link to decision-making by the federal government. Under traditional practices, USPTO patent examiners bear the sole burden of identifying and relating information pertinent to patent applications. Under Peer-to-Patent, expert volunteers were permitted to assist in these efforts at the www.peertopatent.org Web site.

With the consent of participating inventors, patent applications were posted to the Peer-to-Patent site where the expert reviewers discussed the applications and submitted bibliographic information, known as prior art, relevant to determining if an invention was new and non-obvious, as the law requires to obtain a patent. At the conclusion of the review period, this prior art was forwarded to the USPTO patent examiner for consideration and use in their further search efforts.

Major companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Intel, and GE, companies whose patent portfolios account for nearly one-third of the patents issued to the top 30 U.S. patent holders in 2007, all submitted patent applications to the Peer-to-Patent process. Other patent applications were submitted by Red Hat, Cisco, and Yahoo!, as well as smaller firms.

Data from the first year of the Peer-to-Patent pilot shows that an open network of reviewers can improve the quality of information available to patent examiners and that such citizen-reviewers are capable of producing information relevant to the patent examination process and are willing to volunteer time. Initial results based on a survey of patent examiners from the USPTO suggest that information provided by the public is beneficial to the examination process.

Findings from the first-year report include:

* Peer-to-Patent attracted more than 2,000 peer reviewers.

* The first 23 office actions issued during the pilot phase showed use of Peer-to-Patent submitted prior art in nine rejections

* On average, citizen-reviewers contributed 6 hours reviewing each patent application in the pilot

* Although USPTO rules permit third-party prior art submissions on pending applications, the average number of prior art submissions on Peer-to-Patent applications was 2,000 times that of standard rule-based submissions.

* Ninety-two percent of patent examiners surveyed said they would welcome examining another application with public participation, while 73% of participating examiners want to see Peer-to-Patent implemented as a regular office practice.

* 21% of participating examiners stated that prior art submitted by the Peer-to-Patent community was "inaccessible" directly to USPTO examiners.

* Prior art submissions by Peer-to-Patent reviewers were four times as likely to include non-patent literature (any document that is not a patent, including Web sites, journals, textbooks, and databases) as compared to prior art submissions by applicants.

"As the first example of harnessing public knowledge to improve a government process, the first year of Peer-to-Patent was an unquestioned success," Noveck said. She added: "While the impact of this project on patent quality will take longer to assess, the early indications are certainly promising."

We've been following the peer-to-patent project with interest and have linked here on our company weblog to several blog posts and  a YouTube video presentation describing the project and its promise.

What do you think can be learned from the Peer-to-Patent pilot program?

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The team from IP.com Inc. is on the road this week attending the BIO International Convention in San Diego, California, meeting with biotechnology executives and introducing the latest release of InnovationQ, our enterprise software platform that automates and streamlines common intellectual property management functions.

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.

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EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, announced on their blog today the release of Patents and the Public Domain: Improving Patent Quality Upon Reexamination a report finding that there are at least three ways to work toward improving patent quality, including through reexamination:

1. Encourage Organized Efforts to Have a More Thorough Review of Patent Applications

* Increase third party efforts to improve prior art searches and to facilitate a stronger understanding of the world of prior art.

2. Support Organized Efforts After Patents Have Been Issued

* Reexaminations should be limitless in time and with no financial harm limitations (in many countries, public interest organizations like EFF are only allowed to challenge issued patents for a short period of time after they have issued, even though often a patent’s threat to innovations may not be immediately obvious).

* Don't Streamline. Maintain a variety of options for reexamination requesters.

3. Increase Access to Information in the Patent Office

* Update information in the patent office’s online databases regularly.

* Conduct and publish regular evaluations of effectiveness and performance within the Patent Office.

In addition to providing an organized effort through the Patent Busting Project in furtherance of the second goal, EFF is working in conjunction with Mozilla, Yahoo, and the Internet Archive to create a database that will work to achieve the first goal. This Prior Art project is still under development.

The wiki page set up for this contains the project plan for a software prior art initiative under consideration and welcomes constructive input. At the bottom of that wiki page, they point to four related projects:

1. Software Patent Institute
2. Open Source as Prior Art
3. Patent Commons
4. Peer to Patent Project

The Software Patent Institute Database of Software Technologies is contained exclusively in the IP.com Prior Art Database. While limited searching can be performed for free as a "guest", robust and unrestricted searching along with all-inclusive document downloads is available in weekly, monthly, and yearly intervals. Get started searching SPI data today - click here for more information.

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It was interesting to see this interview with Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner on the subject of Monetizing IP. Particularly topical this week was Professor Lerner's answer to this question about patent pools, posed by Sean Silverthorne:

Q: What is happening in the area of patent pools? Are these becoming more popular and, if so, in which industries?

A: In a patent pool, firms blend their patents with those of other firms. These pools allow users to access a number of firms' patents simultaneously, thereby avoiding the "patent thicket." In many cases, the pooling agreements also specify the pricing schedule in the agreement that establishes the pool, assuring that no party attempts to extract very high fees or to increase its fees after users are locked in.

Patent pools date back as far as the 1850s but have proliferated in recent years. Goods covered by patent pools totaled at least $100 billion in the United States in 2000, while multiple standard-setting bodies today cover virtually every high-technology product. Moreover, the scope of these activities is likely to grow in future years. In many industries, leaders have expressed frustration about the proliferation of patent thickets—the large number of overlapping awards—and the ensuing rise of costly and time-consuming litigation. In many cases, technology sharing has been proposed as a remedy.

And the scope of industries considering adopted patent pools has also grown. While the patent pools have been well established in basic manufacturing and electronic industries for decades, they have been seen as a potential solution for increasingly prevalent patent licensing issues elsewhere, such in new biotechnology-related fields. For instance, a great deal of interest has surrounded proposals to use patent pools to address the multiplicity of rights that are slowing research in critical diseases such as AIDS and breast cancer.

Patent pools are only one way in which firms share their technology with each other. The rapid growth of open source software over the course of this decade has been highlighted in numerous press accounts. The multibillion dollar initial public offerings of Red Hat and VA Linux, IBM's embrace of open source and its investment of billions of dollars into these projects, and the recent (though qualified) embrace of Linux by Microsoft, formerly a bitter opponent: all these events have been extensively documented. What is much less well appreciated, however, is that open source is only the tip of the iceberg of the technology sharing that is reshaping high-technology industries. Patent pools, standard-setting organizations, and technology licensing efforts are having a profound effect on how firms seek to exploit new discoveries.

This Q&A is especially topical this week  when, that very same day the interview was published, it was announced that Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Clearwire, Intel Corporation, Samsung Electronics and Sprint have formed the Open Patent Alliance (OPA) to advance a competitive and open intellectual property rights model stimulating a larger WiMAX industry that supports innovation through broader choice and lower equipment and service costs for WiMAX technology, devices and applications globally.

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According to recent news reports, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. will avoid a trial with Visto Corp. after a Canadian court ruled the privately held California-based company infringed on three RIM patents.

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.

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What's in a blog?

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.

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Love the name of this beer, and it's got a great intellectual property backstory.

Salvation. The name of two intricate Belgian-style ales, created by us -- Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing and Adam Avery of Avery Brewing. After becoming friends a few years ago, we realized that we both had a Salvation in our line-ups. Was it going to be a problem? Should one of us relinquish the rights? "Hell no!" we said. In fact, it was quickly decided that we should blend the brews to catch the best qualities of each and create an even more complex libation. In April 2004, in top-secret meeting at Russian River Brewing (well actually it was packed in the pub, and many were looking over our shoulders wondering what the hell was going on), we came up with the perfect blend of the two Salvations. Natalie, Vinnie's much more significant other, exclaimed, "We should call this Collaboration, not Litigation Ale!" -- Perfect!

Have a peaceful, safe weekend and a thoughtful Memorial Day.

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“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.” - General Patton

General Patent Corporation International (GPCI), a leading patent licensing and enforcement firm headquartered in Suffern, NY, according to its press release, reached an important milestone in its patent enforcement campaign on behalf of its subsidiary, Acticon Technologies LLC (Acticon). GPCI recently obtained the 150th settlement under Acticon's portfolio of "smart connector" patents.

"I am absolutely amazed at the success of these patents," said Steven Farago, Ph.D., the inventor of the Acticon "smart connector" technology. "Back in 1996, I wouldn't have thought it was possible to license 150 companies. But General Patent has been wonderful and exceeded all my expectations. They have left no stone unturned in enforcing the Acticon patents."

In another press release marking its 20th year in assertive licensing, General Patent claims to have netted millions of dollars for inventors, championing the causes of independent inventors in their “David vs. Goliath” battles.

Is there a right way and a wrong way for an inventor to go about licensing a patent to a major corporation? Mike Dillon, General Counsel at Sun Microsystems, who says "the best offense...is a good defense", seems to suggest as much here on his blog:

When a third party claim has been clear and the terms reasonable, we have entered into licenses. However, those situations are easily distinguished from the cases that make up almost all of our present docket of patent litigation. These lawsuits have usually been filed with no advance notice, by plaintiffs that don't commercialize their patents (i.e. create and sell products) and in venues considered favorable to them. It's also almost always the case that these plaintiffs have done little or no investigation to ascertain whether our products infringe prior to filing their lawsuit.

Comments ensue. What do you think? Is every non-practicing entity (NPE) that asserts patent rights, with a view toward settling a license, a dreaded patent troll? Or is there a legitimate role for patent management companies to provide professional assertive licensing services to patent holders? And, anyway, is patent litigation the best approach to intellectual property dispute resolution?

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