Tweet of the Week @science_ip

Posted on December 17, 2009 by IP

Who knew that on this day in 1903 the Wright brothers made aviation history with the first flight of a powered airplane?

Science IP, a service of CAS and a division of the American Chemical Society on Twitter @science_ip tweeted about this historic achievement today. It's really difficult, a century later, to comprehend how the Wright brothers learned to fly without having anyone to teach them, if you know what we mean.

Coincidentally, Microsoft Corp. and Flight1 Aviation Technologies (Flight1 Tech) announced today that they have entered into an intellectual property (IP) license agreement that gives Flight1 Tech access to Microsoft ESP's powerful visual simulation technology. Flight1 Tech took a license for the Microsoft® ESP(TM) v1.0 object code, which enables the company to create detailed, customized flight safety, flight training and strategic solutions for its customers.

We learned that from an article in Intellectual Property Today, which the magazine tweeted about on Twitter @IPToday. Wonder if they knew the significance of this day in aviation history?

Following these tweets, we learned more about the Wright brothers the invention and patenting of their "Flying Machine" and the ensuing patent war and about the creation of what was probably the first government-enforced patent pool. Interesting history.

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Is Microsoft Good for Innovation?

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Robert Cantrell

Ideas come to mind where they choose. We have all probably had an important idea come to us early in the morning when in bed, while in the shower, or perhaps while staring at a sedan that won’t get out of our lane. So should it be a surprise that somewhere out in the deep blue sea, while photographing a 16 foot tiger shark and her two slightly smaller companions, it would pop into my mind that Microsoft is actually good for hi-tech innovation for everyone? Bear in mind that I do not work for Microsoft. The only stake I have in Microsoft is a couple hundred shares of its stock. So why did this thought come to mind?

I realized that everything around me on that dive, including my own behavior, had been shaped by these tiger sharks, and more importantly, everything around me was healthier as a result. The sharks had eaten anything that was not healthy long ago. Just as sharks have shaped their underwater environment, there is no doubt that Microsoft has shaped the hi-tech world. It holds a dominant place in critical software markets, and the rest of the hi-tech world has found a way to be compatible with Microsoft, compete with Microsoft, or both. Any company not healthy enough to do so – remember Netscape, for example – has fundamentally died off if not been outright “eaten.” This result has not actually stifled competition, as some people would contend. Like all the other species that have evolved to succeed in a shark shaped ocean, it has actually required people to be highly innovative to thrive and survive in a Microsoft shaped world where consumers, to all of our benefit, can share their software produced data and creations across IT platforms more often than not.

What would happen if Microsoft went away, as many people I have talked to, from programmers to politicians, seem to wish would happen? Our tiger sharks offer an answer to that too. Whenever fishermen wipe out shark populations, an unfortunately all too frequent occurrence this decade in a rush to fill Asian soup bowls, fish populations have plummeted and other fisheries have collapsed. Without the top predators shaping the seas, chaos ensues, and the fish further down on the food chain eat their way into starvation and out of existence. The oceans become barren. Such would be the case with hi-tech innovation if Microsoft suddenly went away. Without this powerful influence of Microsoft to shape the IT markets, the legions of programmers set free to do as they wish would innovate themselves into a chaos of non-compatibility. True business-improving innovation would plummet, and an innovation desert would develop. This would be so even with Linux as an open alternative, because the whole foundation of how Linux exists as an open software platform is shaped by the presence of Microsoft. Without Microsoft, that foundation would fall apart.

So while you may individually rue the day that your enterprise finds itself at the business end of a competitive Microsoft effort, Microsoft’s presence is a natural and important part of the health of the IT space as a whole. Should Microsoft falter or be legislated out of its role some day, innovation in the IT space will experience chaos and decline until some other giant evolves to fill Microsoft’s necessary role. If you are not Microsoft, then your innovation, and the way you protect and market that innovation, will need to be healthy and creative enough to survive and thrive in the presence of Microsoft. The odds are that the innovation and the business model you create, provided you survive, will be stronger and healthier than it would be if no Microsoft was around to put you to the test.

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Who's Jumping Into Patent Pools?

Posted on June 12, 2008 by IP
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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