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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Is this hot or not? Peter Zura points to a new website: USPTO Examiners.

From the USPTO Examiners Mission Statement at the time of this posting:

USPTO Examiners is a website designed for professionals to anonymously review, rank, and learn about a patent examiner or a trademark examining attorney who works at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Patent examiners and trademark examining attorneys are public employees who help determine the technological and economical future growth of each industry and business in the world. A simple word such as “allowed” or “rejected” from a patent examiner or a trademark examining attorney could grow or financially burden a company, business, or individual. Accordingly, it is extremely important for the USPTO to have well trained patent examiners and trademark examining attorneys who understand that each of their decisions could benefit and/or harm an industry, business, and/or individual. Having highly competent patent examiners and trademark examining attorneys will result in the USPTO issuing high quality patents and trademarks.

Patent and trademark practitioners who deal with individual patent examiners and trademark examining attorneys are in the best position to express their opinions (e.g., their concerns, as well as their satisfaction) about each patent examiner or trademark examining attorney. Individuals who refer to this website may factor in the opinions of the patent and trademark practitioners when determining the competency and responsiveness of a particular patent examiner or trademark examining attorney. As such, these opinions could be a valuable tool when planning and strategizing a prosecution of a patent or trademark case, which can result in saving clients and inventors a substantial amount of time and money during the course of prosecuting a patent or a trademark.

Accordingly, this website has been developed to form an online collaborative environment in which members of professional organizations, corporations, and inventors may anonymously pool their experiences and opinions about a patent examiner or a trademark examining attorney, including their knowledge of the law and technology, as well as their accessibility.

Your opinions are completely anonymous. You are only required to make a user name and a password to post an opinion about an individual patent examiner or a trademark examining attorney. We do not require that you reveal your identity or provide any identifying information when making a user name and password to make a posting.

USPTO Examiners appreciates the time that patent and trademark practitioners take to post their anonymous opinions.

It remains to be seen how this "anonymous rating" of patent examiners will work in the patent industry, which tends to be litigious. Will companies that deal with patent examiners have to develop an Internet postings policy like Cisco's that emerged from "lessons learned" from the Patent Troll Tracker Blog fiasco? For a good overview of corporate blogging policies, see the recent post by Patent Attorney Brett Trout at BlawgIT.

If you're interested in the ongoing discussion of anonymous communications online, you might want to listen to the latest podcast on Lawyer2Lawyer in which host Craig Williams interviews Raymond Niro Sr., the attorney who seemed to have been a favorite subject of Rick Frenkel's Patent Troll Tracker Blog. In the second segment of the podcast, Craig speaks with the popular patent blogger, Dennis Crouch from Patently-O, to get his perspective on the Troll Tracker and the dangers of blogging anonymously. Some of that discussion might be relevant to this new USPTO Examiners site, as well, though not specifically mentioned. No doubt, it might be the subject of more blog posts and podcasts in the future.

We'll be following closely the discussion about anonymous free speech concerning patents, too, as it might well be relevant to consider with regard to the Patent Debate discussion board.

What do you think?

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The Platform, Cisco's official blog, has a post announcing that Nobel Laureate, Oscar Winner and former Vice President Al Gore will join Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers in a virtual conversation on climate change and technology innovation on Wednesday, March 19, 2008.

They will be joined by Cisco's Sue Bostrom, EVP, Chief Marketing Officer, in a Cisco TelePresence session before a live audience at VoiceCon to examine the critical role that technology and innovation can play in mitigating climate change. Some topics they will cover include: the latest observations of the effects of global warming and the impact of information technology; how businesses can reduce greenhouse gas emissions through innovation; and, how the technology industry can help create the most sustainable model for addressing global climate change.

Someone might care to ask if Cisco plans to join IBM, Nokia, Pitney-Bowes and Sony in the Eco-Patent Commons announced a few weeks ago.

While we're on the topic, and have the former Vice President's ear, we wonder what Al Gore thinks of the Eco-Patent Commons and the recent paper "A New Mindset for Corporate Sustainability", sponsored by Cisco and BT that  reportedly concluded:

Organisations that wish to grow profitably in the future must focus their efforts to benefit shareholders, society and the environment simultaneously. Concentrating on any one of these areas at the expense of the other two may compromise a business's long-term success. A focus on sustainability provides the best means to implement this triple-pronged strategy simultaneously, enabling organisations to innovate, differentiate themselves and succeed.

Among the 10 steps to turning your company into a sustainability-driven innovator identified by the study and listed in this paper, we note this:

9. Join the networks
A growing number of organisations, networks and other bodies dedicated to encouraging sustainable business are emerging. Get involved with groups such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the UN Global Compact, the International Business Leaders Forum and similar local bodies. Take part in sustainability investment rankings and monitors such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes and the Corporate Responsibility Index.

That's probably a good indication that we might expect Cisco to contribute to the Eco-Patent Commons, too.

Notably, while the academic team collaborating to produce the paper "A New Mindset for Corporate Sustainability" met in person several times, apparently no international travel was required. Using Cisco TelePresence, the high-definition virtual meeting solution, the group was able to come together and discuss their research as though in a conventional face-to-face meeting, whilst reducing travel so as to minimise any negative environmental effects of the collaboration.

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