Tag Archives: patents

UN’s International Telecommunications Union holds patent summit in Geneva on Oct. 10, 2012

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The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) patent summit being held today (Oct. 10, 2012) in Geneva, Switzerland was announced in July 2012 as noted in this July 6, 2012 news item on the BBC News website,

A rash of patent lawsuits has prompted the UN to call smartphone makers and others mobile industry bodies together.

It said the parties needed to address the “innovation-stifling use of intellectual property” which had led to several devices being banned from sale.

It said innovations deemed essential to industry standards, such as 3G or Jpeg photos, would be the meeting’s focus.

It noted that if just one patent holder demanded unreasonable compensation the cost of a device could “skyrocket”.

Microsoft and Apple are among firms that have called on others not to enforce sales bans on the basis of such standards-essential patents.

However, lawyers have noted that doing so would deprive other companies of way to counter-attacking other types of patent lawsuits pursued by the two companies.

Here’s a sample of the activity that has led to convening this summit (excerpted from the BBC news item),

“We are seeing an unwelcome trend in today’s marketplace to use standards-essential patents to block markets,” said the ITU secretary general Dr Hamadoun Toure.

…

Motorola Mobility – now owned by Google – managed to impose a brief sales ban of iPhone and iPads in Germany last year after Apple refused to pay it a licence fee. The dispute centred on a patent deemed crucial to the GPRS data transmission standard used by GSM cellular networks.

…

Samsung has also attempted to use its 3G patents to bar Apple from selling products in Europe, Japan and the US.

…

However, industry watchers note that Apple has used lawsuits to ban Samsung products in both the US and Australia and attempted to restrict sales of other companies’ devices powered by Android.

Mike Masnick commented briefly about the summit in his July 12, 2012 posting on Techdirt,

The UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) — the same unit looking at very questionable plans concerning taxing the internet — has apparently decided that it also needs to step in over the massive patent thicket around smartphones. It’s convening a summit … it looks like they’re only inviting the big companies who make products, and leaving the many trolls out of it. Also, it’s unclear from the description if the ITU really grasps the root causes of the problem: the system itself. …

There’s more information on the ITU summit or patent roundtable webpage,

This Roundtable will assess the effectiveness of RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) – based patent policies. The purpose of this initiative is to provide a neutral venue for industry, standards bodies and regulators to exchange innovative ideas that can guide future discussions on whether current patent policies and existing industry practices adequately respond to the needs of the various stakeholders.

I was particularly interested in the speakers from industry (from the Patent Roundtable programme/agenda),

Segment 1 (Part II: Specific perspectives of certain key stakeholders in “360 view” format):

Moderator: Mr. Knut Blind, Rotterdam School of Management [ Biography ]

Perspectives from certain key stakeholders:

  • Standard Development Organizations:
    Mr. Antoine Dore, ITU
    [ Biography ]
    Mr. Dirk Weiler, ETSI
    [ Biography ]
  • Industry players:
    Mr. BJ Watrous, Apple
    [ Biography ]
    Mr. Ray Warren, Motorola Mobility
    [ Biography ]
    Mr. Michael Fröhlich, RIM [emphasis mine]
    [ Biography ]
  • Patent offices:
    Mr. Michel Goudelis, European Patent Office
    [ Biography ]
    Mr. Stuart Graham, United States Patent and Trademark Office
    [ Biography ]
  • Academic Institution:
    Mr. Tim Pohlmann, Technical University of Berlin

I was surprised to note the presence of a Canadian company at the summit.

In general, hopes do not seem high that anything will be resolved putting me in mind of Middle Eastern peace talks, which have stretched on for decades with no immediate end in sight. We’ll see.

Billions lost to patent trolls; US White House asks for comments on intellectual property (IP) enforcement; and more on IP

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It becomes clear after a time that science, intellectual property (patents, copyright, and trademarks), and business interests are intimately linked which is why I include items on the topic of intellectual property (where I am developing some strong opinions). As for business topics, I am more neutral as my understanding of business is quite limited.

All of this is to explain why I’m taking ‘another kick at the IP (intellectual property) can’. I’m going to start with patents and move on to copyright.

A June 26, 2012 news item from BBC News online highlights the costs associated with patent trolls,

The direct cost of actions taken by so-called “patent trolls” totalled $29bn (£18.5bn) in the US in 2011, according to a study by Boston University.

It analysed the effect of intellectual rights claims made by organisations that own and license patents without producing related goods of their own.

Such bodies say they help spur on innovation by ensuring inventors are compensated for their creations.

But the study’s authors said society lost more than it gained.

A June 27, 2012 commentary by Mike Masnick for Techdirt provides more detail,

The report then goes further to try to figure out whether the trolls are actually benefiting innovation and getting more money to inventors, as the trolls and their supporters like to claim. Unfortunately, the research shows quite a different story — with very little of the money actually flowing back to either inventors or actual innovation. In other words, we’re talking about a pretty massive economic dead-weight loss here. Money flowing from actual innovators and creators… to lawyers, basically. Innovators grow the economy. Lawyers do not.

Masnick’s commentary includes a table from the report showing how the costs have increased since 2005 (approximately $6B) to 2011 (approximately $29B).

The researchers are James E. Besson and Michael J. Meurer at Boston University and the open access report, The Direct Costs from NPE [non-practicing entities] Disputes, is available from the Social Science Research Network.

Interestingly the same day the study from Boston University was released was the same day that the US White House’s Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, Victoria Espinel, announced she wanted comments about US IP enforcement efforts (from Espinel’s June 25, 2012 blog posting),

Today my office is starting the process of gathering input for the Administration’s new strategy for intellectual property enforcement. The overarching objective of the Strategy is to improve the effectiveness of the U.S. Government’s efforts to protect our intellectual property here and overseas. I want to make sure as many people as possible are aware that we are working on this so we can get the very best thoughts and recommendations possible. Part of the process of gathering public input is to publish a “Federal Register Notice” where we formally ask the public to give us their ideas. We will read all of your submissions – and we will make them publicly available so everyone can see them.

…

You can do so by following this link to Regulations.gov where you will find more details for submitting your strategy recommendations beginning today.

I believe that essential to the development of an effective enforcement strategy, is ensuring that any approaches that are considered to be particularly effective as well as any concerns with the present approach to intellectual property enforcement are understood by policymakers. [emphasis Mike Masnick of Techdirt] Recommendations may include, but need not be limited to: legislation, regulation, guidance, executive order, Presidential memoranda, or other executive action, including, but not limited to, changes to agency policies, practices or methods.

Beyond recommendations for government action as part of the next Strategy, we are looking for information on and recommendations for combating emerging or future threats to American innovation and economic competitiveness posed by violations of intellectual property rights. Additionally, it would be useful to the development of the Strategy to receive submissions from the public identifying threats to public health and safety posed by intellectual property infringement, [emphasis mine] in the U.S. and internationally as well as information relating to the costs to the U.S. economy resulting from infringement of intellectual property rights.

Aside: That bit about public health and safety being endangered by infringement is going to have to be explained to me. Moving along, Mike Masnick’s June 26, 2012 commentary about this matter on Techdirt includes an exhortation to participate,

I will be submitting my own thoughts, which I will also publish here, but for those thinking about what to say, I would focus on this sentence above [emphasized in the previous excerpt from the Espinel posting “I believe that essential …”]. Historically, many of the government’s approaches have not been at all effective, and have created a number of significant problems — most of which have been ignored by the government (either willfully or through ignorance). This really is a chance to provide examples of why the current policy is not effective (and will never be effective if it keeps on the current path) as well as the “concerns” with the current approach, such as the criminalization of expressive behavior and the outright censorship of media publications.

Meanwhile, we here in Canada are focused on copyright.

Michael Geist (the Canadian copyright guru) notes in his June 26, 2012 posting (Note: I have removed some links.),

Brian Brett, the former Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and an award winning author, has issued an explosive public letter that “breaks the ‘cone of silence’ that has obscured for too long some of the ugly practices of Access Copyright.”

You can get an idea why Geist described the letter as “explosive” from this excerpt (from the June 26, 2012 commentary in the Georgia Straight),

As a former Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada (I’ve been a member more than thirty years), I have been asked to sign a letter to educational institutions supporting Access Copyright’s efforts to obtain collective licensing agreements with those institutions. I will not sign. I believe the time has come for action, not words. …

…

For the first time in history it has become too complex and expensive to quote the music of our era for many young writers. Writers are being charged exorbitantly for quoting other writers in their poems, fictions, and essays; yet are losing their own rights and income. Meanwhile, the Canadian Government has made legislation favouring educational institutions and media empires (at the expense of creators) in the name of supporting our nation’s culture.

As we earnestly discuss these issues, but do nothing to protect ourselves, we are seeing the rights of creators to fair compensation eroded to the point of where many are at risk of receiving nothing for their work.

Access Copyright, created specifically to collect fair compensation for creators, is central to this discussion. While I believe that educational institutions must pay writers, and will eventually pay them, it’s also necessary to call out the ugly regime of Access Copyright, which is collecting our copyright income. …

…

6. Access Copyright rewards textbook companies who demand that authors relinquish their copyright to their work by paying them both the publisher and creator copyright payment. Academic authors often consider textbook authorship crucial to tenure. Thus academic authors are open to being pressured by publishers out of their copyright. In effect Access Copyright is encouraging textbook publishers to undermine copyright by demanding a creators’ total copyright, and doubling the publisher’s payment for this ugly practice.

So, the academics who write those science and math (and other subject) texts are being pressured by financially motivated publishers to give up copyright while they are also being being pressured to publish for the well-being of their careers. Nicely done Access Copyright! (sarcasm)

While I suspect that I don’t agree with Betts on some issues, I do believe that content creators should receive some financial benefit from their work.

On a more hopeful note, the recent passage of Bill C-11 (Copyright) has some very good things indeed (from the June 21, 2012 commentary by Leigh Beadon on Techdirt [Note: I have removed a link.]),

Michael Geist has an excellent summary of C-11 with a comparison to previous phases of copyright law in Canada. The victories for smarter copyright law in C-11 sound almost like fantasy when compared to the American copyright debate. They include:

  • New fair dealing provisions (our version of fair use) to cover educational uses, plus parody and satire
  • New backup, format-shifting and time-shifting allowances that remove previous restrictions on networked DVRs and internet TV services (similar to those that have suffered in American courts)
  • Explicit copyright exceptions for “user-generated content”, aimed at protecting non-commercial fan-art and remixes
  • A bunch of explicit exceptions for schools, such as the right to stage public performances
  • A notice-and-notice system, not a notice-and-takedown system
  • A $5,000 cap on statutory damages for all non-commercial infringement

Sadly, there is the issue of the ‘digital lock’ provision which was rammed through Parliament despite almost universal condemnation from Canadians of all walks of life. Geist provides much more detail about this issue than I can. In fact, he offers two postings outlining both Canada’s Justice Dept. discussion about the digital lock provisions (June 25, 2012 posting) and the Competition Bureau’s (June 26, 2012 posting) and possible issues with constitutional rights.

On a much happier note for me personally is a recent Federal Court of Canada ruling about linking and posting, from the June 25, 2012 posting on the Michael Geist blog (Note: I have removed links.),

The Federal Court of Canada has issued an important decision involving copyright and posting content online. The case involves a lawsuit launched by Richard Warman and the National Post against Mark and Constance Fournier, who run the FreeDominion website. Warman and the National Post sued the site over the appearance of two articles and an inline link to photograph that appeared on the forum. The court dismissed all three claims.

While the first claim (Warman’s article) was dismissed on the basis that it took too long to file the lawsuit, the legal analysis on the National Post claim involving an article by Jonathan Kay assesses the copyright implications of posting several paragraphs from an article online. In this case, the article was 11 paragraphs long.  The reproduction on the Free Dominion site included the headline, three complete paragraphs and part of a fourth. The court ruled that this amount of copying did not constitute a “substantial part” of the work and therefore there was no infringement. The court added that in the alternative, the reproduction of the work was covered by fair dealing, concluding that a large and liberal interpretation of news reporting would include posts to the discussion forum.  The decision then includes an analysis of the six factor test and concludes that the use was fair.

So I can link to and quote from Canadian publications in peace, for now. (Great news!)

There is some additional analysis of the ruling in a (h/t) June 26, 2012 posting by Leigh Beadon on the Techdirt website.

No grand thoughts here. I just find this very fluid situation with regard to intellectual property important as I believe the outcomes will affect us all in many ways, including how we practice science.

Vancouver (Canada)-based company, Lumerical Solutions, files patent on new optoelectronic simulation software

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I’m not a huge *fan of patents as per various postings (my Oct. 31, 2011 posting is probably my most overt statement) so I’m not entirely thrilled about this news from Lumerical Solutions, Inc. According to the June 14, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Lumerical Solutions, Inc., a global provider of optoelectronic design software, announced the filing of a provisional patent application titled, “System and Method for Transforming a Coordinate System to Simulate an Anisotropic Medium.” The patent application, filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, describes how the optical response of dispersive, spatially varying anisotropic media can be efficiently simulated on a discretized grid like that employed by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) or finite-element method (FEM) simulators. The invention disclosed is relevant to a wide array of applications including liquid crystal display (LCD) panels, microdisplays, spatial light modulators, integrated components using liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) technology like LCOS optical switches, and magneto-optical elements in optical communication and sensing systems.

The company’s June 14, 2012 news release includes this comment from the founder and Chief Technical Office (CTO),

According to Dr. James Pond, the inventor and Lumerical’s Chief Technology Officer, “many next generation opto-electronic products combine complicated materials and nano-scale structure, which is beyond the capabilities of existing simulation tools. Lumerical’s enhanced framework allows designers to accurately simulate everything from liquid crystal displays to OLEDs, and silicon photonics to integrated quantum computing components.”

Lumerical’s new methodology for efficiently simulating anisotropic media is part of a larger effort to allow designers the ability to model the optical response of many different types of materials.  In addition to the disclosed invention, Lumerical has added a material plugin capability which will enable external parties to include complicated material models, such as those required for modelling semiconductor lasers or non-linear optical devices, into FDTD-based simulation projects.

…  According to Chris Koo, an engineer with Samsung, “Lumerical’s latest innovation has established them as the clear leader in the field of optoelectronic device modeling.  Their comprehensive material modeling capabilities paves the way for the development of exciting new technologies.”

I wish the company good luck. Despite my reservations about current patent regimes, I do appreciate that in some situations, it’s best to apply for a patent.

For the curious, here’s a little more (from the company’s About Lumerical page),

By empowering research and product development professionals with high performance optical design software that leverages recent advances in computing technology, Lumerical helps optical designers tackle challenging design goals and meet strict deadlines. Lumerical’s design software solutions are employed in more than 30 countries by global technology leaders like Agilent, ASML, Bosch, Canon, Harris, Northrop Grumman, Olympus, Philips, Samsung, and STMicroelectronics, and prominent research institutions including Caltech, Harvard, Max Planck Institute, MIT, NIST and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Our Name

Lu.min.ous (loo’me-nes) adj., full of light, illuminated

Nu.mer.i.cal (noo-mer’i-kel) adj., of or relating to a number or series of numbers

Lu.mer.i.cal (loo-mer’i-kel) – A company that delivers inventive, highly accurate and cost effective design solutions resulting in significant improvements in product development costs and speed-to-market.

* June 15, 2012: I found the error this morning (9:20 am PDT) and added the word ‘fan’.

NASA, patents, swarmbots, and auctions

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NASA was selling some of its patents a week ago according to Robert McMillan in a March 29, 2012 article for Wired Enterprise,

Psst. If you’re thinking of getting into the intelligent smoke-detector business or building a swarm of nano-bots, NASA has a few patents for you.

In fact, you might even get them at a bargain price. They’re up for auction Thursday [March 29, 2012] in Los Angeles, at an event run by the patent-selling company ICAP Patent Brokerage. NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is listing them as part of a pilot program that has been running for the past four years, trying to make its space-aged technology available to the public.

Who wouldn’t want a crack at the NASA patent, “Swarm Autonomic Agents with Self-Destruct Capability?”

You can still find the listing of patents up for auction here at ICAP’s (patent brokerage) Spring 2012 catalog page. I was amused to note that the NASA patents were classified as ‘open outcry’ auction items. That’s exactly what it sounds like, from the Wikipedia essay (I have removed footnotes, etc.),

An English auction is a type of auction, whose most typical form is the “open outcry” auction. The auctioneer opens the auction by announcing a Suggested Opening Bid, a starting price or reserve for the item on sale and then accepts increasingly higher bids from the floor consisting of buyers with a possible interest in the item. Unlike sealed bid auctions, “open outcry” auctions are “open” or fully transparent as the identity of all bidders is disclosed to each other during the auction. The highest bidder at any given moment is considered to have the standing bid, which can only be displaced by a higher bid from a competing buyer. If no competing bidder challenges the standing bid within a given time frame, the standing bid becomes the winner, and the item is sold to the highest bidder at a price equal to his or her bid.

I also found that this event is more than just an auction, from the Spring 2012 Schedule page,

Spring 2012 Auction Full Event Schedule

Navigating the Catalina Channel: The ICAP Patent Brokerage Summit on IP Strategy and 15th ICAP Ocean Tomo IP Auction  

Tuesday, March 27 

Welcome Reception Lobby Bar- (7:00pm-9:00pm)

Wednesday, March 28 

Registration Opens (8:00am) 

Breakfast (8:00am – 9:00am) – Catalina

General Session (9:15am – 12:00p) – Point Vicente

Opening Remarks and Welcome from Dean Becker, CEO ICAP Patent Brokerage

Every Company is an IP Company – The “Glassybaby Syndrome”

Louis Carbonneau; The Point Law

Take-away:  Every company needs an IP Strategy

Practical Aspects of Intellectual Property as Strategic Business Tools – Swords & Shields

Speaker:  Peter McDermott; Banner, Witcoff

Take-away:  Co-managing prosecution and litigation – an integration strategy

Lunch (12:00pm – 1:30pm) – Catalina

Breakout Sessions (1:30pm – 3:30pm)

Commercialization & Monetization Strategies to Drive Business Value – Point Vicente 1

Moderator:  John Pryor; ICAP Patent Brokerage

Building Business Value Through IP Management – Point Vicente 2

Moderator:  Dr. Elvir Causevic, Ocean Tomo

IP Marketing to Build Business Value – Point Vicente 3

Moderator:  Jennifer Wolfe, Wolfe SBMC; Author Brand ReWired – invited

Networking Break (3:30pm – 4:30pm) – Catalina

Breakout Sessions Continue (4:45pm – 5:45pm) 

Commercialization & Monetization Strategies to Drive Business Value – Point Vicente 1

Moderator:  John Pryor, ICAP Patent Brokerage

Building Business Value Through IP Management – Point Vicente 2

Moderator:  Dr. Elvir Causivic, Ocean Tomo

IP Marketing to Build Business Value – Point Vicente 3

Moderator:  Jennifer Wolfe, Wolfe SBMC; Author Brand ReWired – invited

Dinner (6:30pm cocktails, followed by dinner) – Terranea  

Thursday, March 29

Registration Opens (8:00am)

Breakfast (8:00am – 9:00am) – Catalina

General Session (9:15am – 12:30pm) – Point Vicente 

Building Company Value Through IP – Lessons from Mom, Pop, David and Goliath

Speaker: Louis Foreman; Enventys

Take-away:  In the area of IP Strategy, one size does not fit all

Flat World:  International Patent Strategy

Speaker:  Robert Cantrell:  ThinkIP Strategy 

Take-away:  Managing global Freedom to Operate

Breakout Session Reports

Commercialization & Monetization – Moderator:  John Pryor, ICAP Patent Brokerage

IP Management Roundtable – Moderator:  Dr. Elvir Causivic, Ocean Tomo

IP Marketing to Build Business Value – Moderator:  Jennifer Wolfe, Wolfe SBMC; Author Brand ReWired – invited

Lunch (12:30 – 1:30) – Catalina

Auction (Doors Open 1:45pm; Auction begins 2:00pm) – Ballroom 

They charged a $1495 US registration fee with hotel accommodation additional to the fee. You may want to start saving for the next event now.

I wonder if anyone bid on the ‘swarmbots’ and if so, who? Finally, if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say these folks are firmly committed to patents as a means of control rather than as a means of stimulating innovation.

David Koepsell: nanotechnology brings the intellectual property regime to an end

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David Koepsell, author of Innovation and Nanotechnology: Converging Technologies and the End of Intellectual Property, is a philosopher, attorney, and educator who teaches at the Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). He is also author of Who Owns You? The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes.

In a Feb. 27, 2012 interview with Dr. J (James Hughes, executive director of the Institute of Ethics for Emerging Technologies [IEET] and producer/interviewer for Changesurfer radio), Koepsell discussed his book about nanotechnology and the disappearance of intellectual property regimes in a 28 min. 51 sec. podcast.

Koepsell and Dr. J provided a good description of converging technologies so I’m going to plunge in without much introduction.

I wasn’t expecting to hear about Marxism and the means of production but there it was, mentioned in the context of a near future society where manufacturing can be done by anyone, anywhere by means of molecular manufacturing or by means of 3D fabrication, or etc. The notion is that production will be democratized as will the intellectual property regime. There were several mentions of the state (government) no longer having control in the future over intellectual property, specifically patents and copyrights, and some discussion of companies that guard their intellectual property jealously. (I have commented on the intellectual property topic, most recently,  in my Patents as weapons and obstacles posting in October 2011. Koepsell is mentioned in this posting.)

Both Koepsell and the interviewer (Dr. J) mentioned the possibility of widespread economic difficulty as jobs disappear due to the disappearance of manufacturing and other associated jobs as people can produce their own goods (much like you can with Star Trek’s replicators). But it did seem they mentioned job loss somewhat blithely, secure in their own careers as academics who as a group are not known for their manufacturing prowess or, for that matter, the production of any goods whatsoever.

It seems to me this future bears a remarkable resemblance to the past, where people had to create their own products by raising their own food, spinning, weaving, and sewing their own clothes, etc. The Industrial Revolution changed all that and turned most folks into ‘wage slaves’. As I recall, that’s from Marx and it’s a description of a loss of personal agency/autonomy, i.e., being a slave to wages (no longer producing your own food, clothing, etc.) and not a reference to poor wages as many believe (including me until I got a somewhat snotty professor for one of my courses).

The podcast is definitely worth your time if you don’t mind the references to Marx (there aren’t many) as the ideas are provocative even if you don’t agree. Koepsell describes how his interest in this area was awakened (he wrote about software, which is both copyrightable as writing and patentable as a machine).

The book is available as a free download or you can purchase it here. Here’s a brief excerpt from the book’s introduction (I removed a citation number),

Science demands unfettered inquiry into the workings of nature, and replaces the confidence previously demanded over rote knowledge with a practiced skepticism, and ongoing investigation. With the rise of the age of science came the need to develop new means of treating information. Scientific investigations conducted by ‘natural philosophers’ could only be conducted in full view, out in the open, with results published in meetings of scientific societies and their journals. Supplanting secret-keeping and obscurantism, the full sunlight of public and peer scrutiny could begin to continually cleanse false assumptions and beliefs, and help to perfect theories about the workings of the world. Science demanded disclosure, where trades and arts often encouraged secrets. And so as natural philosophers began to disseminate the results of their investigations into nature, new forms of trade, art, and industry began to emerge, as well as the demand for new means of protection in the absence of secrecy. Thus, as the scientific age was dawning, and helping to fuel a new technological revolution, modern forms of IP [intellectual property] protection such as patents and copyrights emerged as states sought to encourage the development of the aesthetic and useful arts. By granting to authors and inventors a monopoly over the practice of their art, as long as they brought forth new and useful inventions (or for artistic works, as long as they were new), nation states helped to attract productive and inventive artisans and trades into their borders. These forms of state monopoly also enabled further centralization of trades and industries, as technologies now could become immune from the possibility of ‘reverse-engineering’ and competitors could be kept at bay by the force of law. This sort of state-sanctioned centralization and monopoly helped build the industrial revolution (by the account of many historians and economists, although this assumption has lately been challenged) as investors now could commodify new technologies free from the threat of direct competition, secure in the safe harbor of a state-supported monopoly over the practice of a useful art for a period of time.

In many ways, traditional IP [intellectual property] was (and is) deemed vital to the development of large industries and their infrastructures, and to the centralized, assembly-line factory mode of production that dominated the twentieth century. With the benefit of a state-sanctioned monopoly, industry could build sufficient infrastructure to dominate a market with a new technology for the duration of a patent. This confidence assured investors that there would be some period of return on the investment in which other potential competitors are held at bay, at least from practicing the art as claimed in the patent. Factories could be built, supply chains developed, and a market captured and profited from, and prices will not be subject to the ruthless dictates of supply and demand. Rather, because of the luxury of a protected market during the period of protection, innovators can inflate prices to not only recoup the costs of investment, but also profit as handsomely as the captive market will allow.

For most of the twentieth century, IP allowed the concentration of industrial production into the familiar factory, assembly-line model. Even while the knowledge behind new innovation moved eventually into the public domain as patents lapsed, during the course of the term of patent protection, strictly monopolized manufacturing processes and their products could be heavily capitalized, and substantial profits realized, before a technique or technology lost its protection. But the modes and methods of manufacturing are now changing, and the necessity of infrastructural investment is also being altered by the emergence of new means of production, including what we’ll call ‘micromanufacturing’, which is a transitional technology on the way to true MNT (molecular nanotechnology), and is included in our discussions of ‘nanowares’. Essentially, assembly-lines and supply chains that supported the huge monopolistic market dominance models of the industrial revolution, well into the twentieth century, are becoming obsolete. If innovation and production can be linked together with modern and futuristic breakthroughs in micromanufacturing (in which small components can be fabricated and produced en mass, cheaply) and eventually molecular manufacturing (in which items are built on the spot, from the ground up, molecule by molecule), then we should consider whether the IP regimes that helped fuel the industrial revolution are still necessary, or even whether they were ever necessary at all. Do they promote new forms of innovation and production, or might they instead stifle potentially revolutionary changes in our manners of creation and distribution?

Amusingly, towards the end of the interview Dr. J plugs Koepsell’s ‘nanotechnology’ book by noting it’s available for free downloads then saying ‘we’re hoping you’ll buy it’ (at the publisher’s site).

UK research not applying for enough patents?

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As I understand it, patent and copyright regimes were instituted to stimulate innovation by guaranteeing that an inventor or a ‘creative’ would receive compensation for a particular piece of work during a limited period of time. It was not intended to limit competition or provide funds in perpetuity for either the corporations that happen to hold the copyright or patent or for the inventor’s or creator’s descendents as seems to be the case these days. (I wrote extensively about patents being used to limit competition in my Oct. 31, 2011 posting titled, Patents as weapons and obstacles.)

To be very clear, I am not arguing against patent and copyright regimes but I am suggesting that the excesses of today’s regimes are strangling innovation. Given my particular take on the situation, I read the Dec. 16, 2011 news item on Nanowerk with mixed feelings. From the news item,

As the UK government invests into supporting graphene research, the patent activity of UK universities lags behind that of their global peers according to research by CambridgeIP [intellectual property] published in Nature Materials (“Exploiting carbon flatland” [public access as of Dec. 17, 2011]). [emphasis mine]

“Since 2007 there has been a rapid increase in the rate of global patent filings around graphene. And patents are central to business models and business strategies in many key application sectors for graphene developments, such as semiconductors and biotech.” said Quentin Tannock (Chairman, CambridgeIP) “Despite playing host to Nobel Prize-winning graphene researchers, UK academic institutions hold far fewer graphene patents than their peers in China, South Korea and the USA. This raises the serious question of how ‘UK plc’ will reap commercial returns on its significant cash investments into academic research into graphene.” [emphasis mine]

It’s understandable that they (UK) would want to reap the rewards of their research and the investments in that research. It does, however, get a little confusing for me here (from the news item),

“One of the striking features of the graphene patent landscape is what is not present. Andre Geim, one of the two winners of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene” is not listed as an inventor on any published graphene patent application. The University of Manchester has applied for significantly fewer patents than its global peers in graphene research.” [emphases mine]

I’m not sure why only Andre Gheim is mentioned as the inventor since he shared the 2010 Nobel prize with Konstantin Novoselov. Also, does one need to mention the inventor in a patent? Is one  still required to reference Alexander Graham Bell for a patent on a phone of some sort?

I got curious about CambridgeIP since the author of the article in Nature Materials, Quentin Tannock is Chairman of the company. Here’s the company’s mission statement (from the CambridgeIP website),

CambridgeIP’s mission is to accelerate the development, deployment and dissemination of valuable technologies.
We achieve this by working with our clients in the public and private sectors to create and deliver winning technology and IP strategies, and by developing thought leadership in technology and innovation.
We help them build and monetize intellectual assets, develop commercial and R&D strategies and roadmaps, and deploy technologies to maximum impact. We also provide our clients with resources including global-leading access to patent data, science literature, analysis tools and evidence-based insights drawn from our extensive technology and IP strategy experience. [emphasis mine]

I gather CambridgeIP provides patent data and other resources through a company called Boliven which is possibly a CambridgeIP spinoff or affiliate. (Both CambridgeIP and Boliven are listed as sources for the news item.) The About page on the Boliven website does not make the nature of the relationship explicit although it’s existence is obvious,

Boliven is a leading online information portal for IP, R&D and business development professionals in science and technology intensive industries.

With over 100 million peer-reviewed documents spanning patents, journal articles, press releases and other data sources, Boliven enables professionals to rapidly identify novel technologies, clients, partners, commercialisation opportunities and ideas.

…

Boliven has developed a robust set of free search, analytics, and export tools to help you capitalize on our 100+ million public records and peer-reviewed documents.

For example, Boliven offers members access to one of the world’s largest free patent search engines, with over 60 million records from around the world. Our analytics tools help you detect patterns and relationships in the data through easy-to-understand visualizations, charts, and graphs. Our exporting tools help you take your analysis in-house, through Word of Excel or other productivity applications. Our company profiles section provides a snapshot of the latest research, business and legal activity by the world’s leading technology companies

Many of our best ideas come from our members, so feel free to offer your recommendations on things you’d like to see on Boliven. Contact us on boliven@cambridgeip.com. [emphases mine]

Herein is the source of my mixed feelings regarding the news item. As I noted earlier in this posting, there should be a return on investment (ROI) but this news item and the article it refers to certainly seem self-serving given that CambridgeIP and Boliven market their services to the very people/institutions they feel should be applying for more patents.

Nano jobs, bits, and bobs

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There’s a postdoctoral position at Penn State Center for Nanoscale Science (from the NISE [Nanoscale Informal Science Education] Net October newsletter),

Nano Employment Opportunity: Postdoctoral Position in Education and Outreach with Penn State MRSEC

The Penn State Center for Nanoscale Science, a NSF-supported Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), has a postdoctoral position available in education and outreach. The successful candidate will join a team developing and presenting education and outreach programs materials including nanoscience curriculum for K-12 students and teachers among other tasks. Interested applicants should go to the Penn State job opportunity site and scroll down to the Postdoctoral Position – Center for Nanoscale Science (MRSEC Center) listing for more details and application instructions.

The newsletter also features its monthly nano haiku,

Teeny-tiny stuff,
you act so different now.
Wish you were still big.

by Leigha Horton of the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Thanks to someone on Twitter (sorry, I don’t remember who) I found  Nature journalist Geoff Brumfiel’s interview (published Oct. 7, 2010) with one of the winners (Andre Geim) of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics. Given my interest in intellectual property, here’s Geim’s response to a question about patents,

You haven’t yet patented graphene. Why is that?

We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, “We’ve got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?” It’s quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, “We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it’s really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us.” That’s a direct quote.

I considered this arrogant comment, and I realized how useful it was. There was no point in patenting graphene at that stage. You need to be specific: you need to have a specific application and an industrial partner. Unfortunately, in many countries, including this one, people think that applying for a patent is an achievement. In my case it would have been a waste of taxpayers’ money.

This is a very engaging and funny (particularly Geim’s response to the final question: “Finally, are you one of those Nobel prizewinners who is going to go crazy now that you’ve won?” of the interview.

Patents and innovation; should Canada take its cue from India?

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Anti-retroviral drugs are invaluable therapy for  AIDS patients and the world is dependent on India for a cheap supply of the drugs. According to an article (Indian Trade Agreements Could Choke AIDS Drug Lifeline) by Jenara Nerenberg on the Fast Company website, this access could be jeopardized,

India is the primary supplier of anti-retroviral (ARVs) AIDS drugs in middle and low-income countries. And a report from the Journal of the International AIDS Society reveals just how catastrophic it would be if somehow that supply were to get cut off due to political, trade, or disaster-related causes: In some countries, up to 90% of children with AIDS are dependent on India’s cheap, generic drugs.

… The massive, low-cost ARV production industry in India has been made possible by the country’s patent laws. “Indian laws did not grant patents on a product, but only on a process to make it, which helped its drug firms to make cheaper versions and improved formulations using alternative methods,” SciDev.net reports. [emphasis mine]

…

But not everyone in the world sees those laissez faire patent laws as a good thing. India is in ongoing discussions with the World Trade Organization and the EU, but there is fear that increased patent requirements may dismantle the country’s thriving ARV production industry.

Interesting that a demand to patent products would mean less competition. If India’s experience with anti-retroviral drugs is any indicator, while patenting products gives you more patents (handy when countries are comparing scientific leadership by measuring the number of patents [amongst other criteria] that have been filed) patenting a process leads to more competition or should we call it innovation.

If there’s interest in innovation/competition (something the Canadian politicians and government agencies are very concerned about stimulating) then, I think Canada should look to India and its experience with anti-retroviral drugs for inspiration.

Thinking about Canada’s copyright act, property rights, and slowing innovation

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A new copyright bill is supposed to be introduced to Canada’s Parliament sometime this week according to both Michael Geist and the National Post. From Geist’s blog(May 19, 2010),

The National Post’s Don Martin reports that the copyright bill could be introduced next week with confirmation of the broad outlines of the bill I reported on earlier this month. Martin, who, describes the forthcoming bill as heavy-handed, reports:

All signals suggest Heritage Minister James Moore has triumphed over the objections of Industry Minister Tony Clement, setting up Canada to march in excessively protected lockstep with a United States that boasts the toughest laws against pirated music or movies on the planet.

In Geist’s latest post (May 25, 2010) on this issue,

The foundational principle behind C-61 was the primacy of digital locks. When a digital lock (often referred to as digital rights management or technological protection measure) is used – to control copying, access or stifle competition – the lock supersedes virtually all other rights. The fight over the issue has pitted the tech-savvy Industry Minister Tony Clement, who has reportedly argued for a flexible implementation, against Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, who has adopted what many view as an out-of-touch approach that would bring back the digital lock provisions virtually unchanged.

Moore has declined to comment on his position, but his approach raises some difficult questions …

I have posted elsewhere about the impact that intellectual property law (which includes copyright, patents, and trademarks) can have on the practice of science/innovation, i.e. crippling it, and on how the number of patents received are used as a measure of scientific progress. It’s interesting that a measure for progress can also function as an impediment to it.

In contrast to the usual discussion about copyright, Mike Masnick (Techdirt) has written an article (May 24, 2010) that highlights the notion of fairness-based legal liability. From the article,

His [Marshall van Alstyne] most recent paper, co-authored with Gavin Clarkson, explores both how strict intellectual property rights lead to socially inefficient outcomes, and how “fairness” principles could be much more efficient. The paper uses a combination of real world examples, previous research and game theory to make a rather compelling case.

Basically, it explains all the reasons why intellectual property leads to hoarding of information that slows innovation:

Property rights provide incentives to create information but they also provide incentives to hoard it prior to the award of protection. All-or-nothing rights, in particular, limit prior sharing. An unintended consequence is to slow, not has- ten, forward progress when innovation hinges on combining disparately owned private ideas.

Apply this thinking (“… they [property rights] also provide incentives to hoard it prior to the award of protection”) to nanotechnology and the other emerging technologies all of which are highly dependent on interdisciplinary cooperation and you can see what starts happening. Then add some of the current copyright craziness (a YouTube clip of This hour has 22 minutes),

As the video makes clear, once ownership has been awarded, i.e. you have a copyright, there are the issues of control for the purposes of your business model.

It would seem that if the ‘new’ bill resembles the old bill, Canadians will be faced with the possibility of less innovation via this new law despite the feedback the government received during last summer’s public consultations and at a time when it’s been recognized that there is too little innovation in Canada.

Dr. Wei Lu, the memristor, and the cat brain; military surveillance takes a Star Trek: Next Generation turn with a medieval twist; archiving tweets; patents and innovation

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Last week I featured the ‘memristor’ story mentioning that much of the latest excitement was set off by Dr. Wei Lu’s work at the University of Michigan (U-M). While HP Labs was the center for much of the interest, it was Dr. Lu’s work (published in Nano Letters which is available behind a paywall) that provoked the renewed interest. Thanks to this news item on Nanowerk, I’ve now found more details about Dr. Lu and his team’s work,

U-M computer engineer Wei Lu has taken a step toward developing this revolutionary type of machine that could be capable of learning and recognizing, as well as making more complex decisions and performing more tasks simultaneously than conventional computers can.

Lu previously built a “memristor,” a device that replaces a traditional transistor and acts like a biological synapse, remembering past voltages it was subjected to. Now, he has demonstrated that this memristor can connect conventional circuits and support a process that is the basis for memory and learning in biological systems.

Here’s where it gets interesting,

In a conventional computer, logic and memory functions are located at different parts of the circuit and each computing unit is only connected to a handful of neighbors in the circuit. As a result, conventional computers execute code in a linear fashion, line by line, Lu said. They are excellent at performing relatively simple tasks with limited variables.

But a brain can perform many operations simultaneously, or in parallel. That’s how we can recognize a face in an instant, but even a supercomputer would take much, much longer and consume much more energy in doing so.

So far, Lu has connected two electronic circuits with one memristor. He has demonstrated that this system is capable of a memory and learning process called “spike timing dependent plasticity.” This type of plasticity refers to the ability of connections between neurons to become stronger based on when they are stimulated in relation to each other. Spike timing dependent plasticity is thought to be the basis for memory and learning in mammalian brains.

“We show that we can use voltage timing to gradually increase or decrease the electrical conductance in this memristor-based system. In our brains, similar changes in synapse conductance essentially give rise to long term memory,” Lu said.

Do visit Nanowerk for the full explanation provided by Dr. Lu, if you’re so inclined. In one of my earlier posts about this I speculated that this work was being funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) which is part of the US Dept. of Defense . Happily, I found this at the end of today’s news item,

Lu said an electronic analog of a cat brain would be able to think intelligently at the cat level. For example, if the task were to find the shortest route from the front door to the sofa in a house full of furniture, and the computer knows only the shape of the sofa, a conventional machine could accomplish this. But if you moved the sofa, it wouldn’t realize the adjustment and find a new path. That’s what engineers hope the cat brain computer would be capable of. The project’s major funder, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [emphasis mine], isn’t interested in sofas. But this illustrates the type of learning the machine is being designed for.

I previously mentioned the story here on April 8, 2010 and provided links that led to other aspects of the story as I and others have covered it.

Military surveillance

Named after a figure in Greek mythology, Argos Panoptes (the sentry with 100 eyes), there are two new applications being announced by researchers in a news item on Azonano,

Researchers are expanding new miniature camera technology for military and security uses so soldiers can track combatants in dark caves or urban alleys, and security officials can unobtrusively identify a subject from an iris scan.

The two new surveillance applications both build on “Panoptes,” a platform technology developed under a project led by Marc Christensen at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The Department of Defense is funding development of the technology’s first two extension applications with a $1.6 million grant.

The following  image, which accompanies the article at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) website, features an individual who suggests a combination of the Geordi character in Star Trek: The Next Generation with his ‘sensing visor’ and a medieval knight in full armour wearing his helmet with the visor down.

Soldier wearing helmet with hi-res "eyes" courtesy of Southern Methodist University Research

From the article on the SMU site,

“The Panoptes technology is sufficiently mature that it can now leave our lab, and we’re finding lots of applications for it,” said ‘Marc’ Christensen [project leader], an expert in computational imaging and optical interconnections. “This new money will allow us to explore Panoptes’ use for non-cooperative iris recognition systems for Homeland Security and other defense applications. And it will allow us to enhance the camera system to make it capable of active illumination so it can travel into dark places — like caves and urban areas.”

Well, there’s nothing like some non-ccoperative retinal scanning. In fact, you won’t know that the scanning is taking place if they’re successful  with their newest research which suggests the panopticon, a concept from Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century about prison surveillance which takes place without the prisoners being aware of the surveillance (Wikipedia essay here).

Archiving tweets

The US Library of Congress has just announced that it will be saving (archiving) all the ‘tweets’ that have been sent since Twitter launched four years ago. From the news item on physorg.com,

“Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive — ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006!” the Washington-based library, the world’s largest, announced in a message on its Twitter account at Twitter.com/librarycongress.

“That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions,” Matt Raymond of the Library of Congress added in a blog post.

Raymond highlighted the “scholarly and research implications” of acquiring the micro-blogging service’s archive.

He said the messages being archived include the first-ever “tweet,” sent by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and the one that ran on Barack Obama’s Twitter feed when he was elected president.

Meanwhile, Google made an announcement about another twitter-related development, Google Replay, their real-time search function which will give you data about the specific tweets made on a particular date.  Dave Bruggeman at the Pasco Phronesis blog offers more information and a link to the beta version of Google Replay.

Patents and innovation

I find it interesting that countries and international organizations use the number of patents filed as one indicator for scientific progress while studies indicate that the opposite may be true. This news item on Science Daily strongly suggests that there are some significant problems with the current system. From the news item,

As single-gene tests give way to multi-gene or even whole-genome scans, exclusive patent rights could slow promising new technologies and business models for genetic testing even further, the Duke [Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy] researchers say.

The findings emerge from a series of case studies that examined genetic risk testing for 10 clinical conditions, including breast and colon cancer, cystic fibrosis and hearing loss. …

In seven of the conditions, exclusive licenses have been a source of controversy. But in no case was the holder of exclusive patent rights the first to market with a test.

“That finding suggests that while exclusive licenses have proven valuable for developing drugs and biologics that might not otherwise be developed, in the world of gene testing they are mainly a tool for clearing the field of competition [emphasis mine], and that is a sure-fire way to irritate your customers, both doctors and patients,” said Robert Cook-Deegan, director of the IGSP Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy.

This isn’t an argument against the entire patenting system but rather the use of exclusive licenses.