John Martin and his team at Innography have released their bi-annual update on the patent market. LINK. Their primary finding: Alice v. CLS Bank “hasn’t affected the volume of US patent sales, which continues its roughly 10% per year increase over the last several years.” The short report hits a number of highlights, including recent deals by Porsche, Google, LinkedIn, and others. Although the report does delve into particularly technological issues, its tracking remains in terms of quantities rather than valuation.
I read the report linked to above, and it refers to # assignments as a proxy for volume of patent sales.
However, volume is a poor indicator of the health of the market. The question I would like to have answered is how has the price per patent changed from year to year. Additionally, that needs to be broken out by technology (since the recently changes to patent law has disproportionately impacted some technology areas).
OT but you can listen to the en banc oral arguments in Lexmark and In re Tam via this link: link to 717madisonplace.com
or (preferred) you can listen to them at the CAFC’s home page here:
In re Tam: link to cafc.uscourts.gov
Lexmark: link to cafc.uscourts.gov
By the way, the author of the comments at the Madison Place blog doesn’t appear to have a great grasp on patent law. See, e.g., link to 717madisonplace.com, including an observation about stock prices dipping after a patent is invalidated, followed by this quip: “[I]t would be interesting to see if the change in stock price could be used as evidence of commercial success. It would be hard to say that there is no nexus.”
That’s not how the analysis works.
Tam hired some good attorneys. The government’s attorney … oy. Even when the judges are tossing softballs and trying to help him out he’s whiffing left and right. Maybe it’s a problem with the government’s theory of the case but it seems more like a problem of not understanding what the theory is sufficiently to explain or defend it — kind of a problem when it’s your own theory.
Tam’s attorney is Ron Coleman – link to likelihoodofconfusion.com
Folks who insist that reliance on “knowledge of the skilled artisan” should trump fundamental statutory considerations (e.g., eligibility, written description) or otherwise serve to “shoehorn” ineligible subject matter into the system may wish to listen to the oral arguments in In re Alsabah.
At issue was a design patent application that consisted only of information (an arrangement of arabic letters described as a “teaching aid”) without any indication of a substrate to which the design could/would be applied.
The attorney admitted in the argument that the MPEP section on examining design patents would need to be revised to include some sort of enablement analysis to account for similar circumstances (failure to refer to a substrate on which the design is applied) which may arise in the future. Deadpan response from the judge: “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
The lurking issue seemed to be what is the minimum amount of information that needs to be provided in a design drawing to indicate that the design can be applied to any substrate (assuming that a unitary class of such information exists).
Noted that since this tracks known successful patent sales, it does not tell if there were more unsuccessful attempted sales.
The insights on Alice vs CLS bank are myth buster as everyone speculated diminish patent purchases. Apart from the Alice vs CLS Bank, another great insight provided by Innography is about the increasing patent sales of batteries.
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