Convergences

Bleeding Biotech

At The American, a new article Bleeding Biotech, arguing for better protection of intellectual property in data. I frame the question as

In the end, we will never be able to arrive at agreement on the perfect period for data protection for biological research. There is still no agreement on the proper period for patent protection, and that system has been around for hundreds of years. A 20-year period was picked for patents, and it seems to work well enough, so the failure to achieve perfection is not of great concern.

With regard to biotechnology and data exclusivity, we are and will remain similarly ignorant. So the question is actually quite simple: what are the costs of error in each direction?

The answer is that the costs of too much protection are low, or non-existent; the costs of too little are very high. Which should make the decision easy.

In re Bilski: Business methods, software patents, and beyond.

The deadline for filing amicus briefs in support of the Federal Circuit's attempt to trim back business method patents in Bilski passed on October 2. Many briefs have been filed, and much fuss has been made in the tech community, for business method patents are linked to the problem of software patents. Many software patents, such as Amazon's 1-click order patent, are for business methods.

If the courts ultimately trim back business method patents, will this take some of the software-patent-related pressure off both tech and the patent system? Not as much as many in the tech community or the patent community would hope, for reasons I examine below. Patent reform is now being driven by business constituencies, and these constituencies are not good at all at working on big picture institutional problems. There, in short, is a not-seeing-forest-for trees problem.

Live.com

Live.com is replacing Google in my affections as my first-line search choice. Substantively, the searches seem a bit more precise, with fewer extraneous hits near the top of the list. In the long-term, as the volume of noise on the Internet grows super-exponentially (if there is such a concept), excluding becomes as or more important than including.

Also - LIve has great pictures as background, every day a new one. Run your cursor over the picture and various mini-window pop up, with links to information about the site. Today is Wyoming's Devil's Tower.  As I said to a colleague recently, the great thing about the Internet is that it makes procrastination so efficient.

FTC Patent Hearings

There is a general expectation that patent reform will return to the Congressional agenda next year, so the Federal Trade Commission has put itself at the head of the hearings queue.

On Dec. 5, it "will hold the first of a possible series of public hearings to explore the evolving market for intellectual property (IP). . . .  The FTC will examine changes in IP law, patent-related business models, and new learning about the operation of the IP marketplace since the issuance in October 2003 of the Commission report To Promote Innovation: The Proper Balance of Competition and Patent Law and Policy."

The Chief Judge of the Federal Circuit will give a keynote address, and three panels will address developing business models, recent and proposed changes in remedies law (including their impact on innovation and consumers), and legal doctrines that affect the value and licensing of patents, such as the recent Supreme Court cases on obviousness, declaratory judgment and exhaustion, and doctrines that make the scope and enforcement of patents unpredictable.

Comments will be open until February 5.