US Patent Office Does Initial Rejection On All Claims For Patent On Creating Subdomains

from the so-why-was-it-approved-in-the-first-place? dept

You may recall, a few years back, some news around a patent holding company getting a patent on virtual subdomains. As part of its Patent Busting project, the EFF submitted a ton of prior art to the Patent Office, who has now done an initial rejection of all of the patent's claims. The patent holder (and, it's worth pointing out that it's changed hands since this started) can now respond or just give up on the patent. Either way though, it highlights the silliness of considering any granted patent as automatically "valid." Considering how many patents that are reviews end up having claims (sometimes all of them) rejected, it seems pretty clear that the initial patent review is simply not even close to effective as a judge of patent-worthiness.

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NTP Can't Leave Well Enough Alone Concerning RIM

from the the-money-wasn't-enough? dept

In one of the biggest travesties of the patent system, over two years ago, RIM agreed to pay NTP $612.5 million for patent infringement, even though the USPTO had been rejecting NTP's patents on re-exam. The patents were highly questionable: extremely broad patents covering pretty basic concepts about making email "wireless." Beyond combining two existing ideas in a rather obvious way, there was a fair amount of prior art as well. Yet, under pressure from both the judge and its own shareholders, RIM decided it was worth paying out over half a billion dollars rather than dealing with the potential uncertainty of an injunction forcing it to shut down its service.

You would think that this would have kept NTP happy. After all, NTP was basically built out of the ashes of a company that had failed in the marketplace. It was unable to come up with a product that anyone wanted. RIM, on the other hand, had done the real innovation of figuring out what customers actually wanted, and packaging it in an appealing manner. All that was left at NTP was a bunch of lawyers, who now had $612.5 million for failing in the marketplace.

But NTP won't stop. It's kept suing a bunch of other companies. However, the courts have put its latest lawsuits on hold while the USPTO continues to review the legitimacy of NTP's patents (why RIM wasn't allowed the same consideration has never been explained).

So now NTP is taking another strategy: claiming that RIM unfairly influenced the Patent Office's re-exam of its patents. Yes, the company already won the lawsuit and $612.5 million, but is still claiming that the other side cheated. Of course, there's not much "there" there in the accusations. Basically, RIM had representatives who tried to find out what was happening at the USPTO and what the process was for the re-exam. As various patent attorneys outline towards the end of the article, it doesn't appear that RIM did anything wrong here, but NTP is doing whatever it can to try to bloody RIM, even given the fact that it won the lawsuit. What we're seeing here is a case of extreme rent-seeking, where NTP will do pretty much anything to try to keep milking its highly questionable patents, diverting hundreds of millions away from innovation and into the pockets of folks who failed in the marketplace.

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JPEG Patent's Single Claim Rejected (And Smacked Down For Good Measure)

from the a-good-first-step dept

We've been covering the ongoing saga of an old patent we've referred to as the "JPEG Patent." This actually isn't the first patent we've called the JPEG Patent, because multiple people claimed to hold patents over the technology that goes into a JPEG image. But, this one was rather special. The patent had been used, repeatedly, by lawyer Ray Niro, against a wide range of opponents, including a patent system critic. The end result was a drawn out review process where all of the original claims were rejected, but a single new claim was added to the patent, which Niro insisted covered JPEGs on a website.

Earlier this year, the Patent Office agreed to re-examine that claim. On top of that, a judge overseeing one of the lawsuits involving the patent decided to put the suit on hold pending the outcome of the re-exam. Of course, the re-exam will take some time, but the initial re-exam came out recently and it does not look good for this patent:

The one remaining claim was rejected on 19 different grounds, and then the examiner went on for over 40 pages, explaining in great detail, why the claim (and, thus, the entire patent) were not valid. Kinda makes you wonder why it was approved in the first place, but that's a different discussion for a different day. This is, of course, just the initial re-exam. Niro gets to respond, but given the amount of detail that goes into rejecting a single claim, he's got quite an uphill battle.

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Owner Of Infamous JPEG Patent Tries To Line Jump The Re-Exam Process

from the shot-down-by-the-uspto dept

You may recall the infamous "JPEG patent" we've talked about recently. It's the one that patent attorney Ray Niro, about whom the phrase "patent troll" was initially coined, has used to sue all sorts of critics or companies he doesn't appear to like. The history of the patent in question is incredibly questionable. It went through a seven year re-exam once before, where all the claims were rejected. However, a single new claim was allowed instead, which is the basis of all of these lawsuits. Back in March, however, the Patent Office agreed to re-examine that one claim, noting that the earlier re-exam didn't count, because this claim was new and was merely "examined" rather than "re-examined."

With that re-exam going on, a judge put the cases involving that patent on hold until the re-exam was complete. So what did the patent holder do? It tried to convince the Patent Office to allow it to completely jump the line, passing a bunch of other patents that were being re-examined. Luckily, the USPTO turned down the request, noting that the circumstances involving this patent don't seem all that different than the circumstances facing many of the patents it's reviewing.

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Patent Re-Exams Improve Patent Quality; So Why Does Congress Want To Limit Them?

from the questions-that-should-be-answered dept

I've explained why I'm not comfortable with the proposed patent reform effort, as there are a number of changes in it that could potentially make the system much worse. One example, as the EFF highlighted last month, was that it would unnecessarily limit the ability of third parties to request a re-exam of a patent. Now the EFF is looking through some statistics and noting some rather shocking numbers about third-party-initiated patent re-exams. Contrary to what some supporters of the patent system claim, it appears that a large majority of these requests aren't just legitimate requests, but serve to have a patent's claims limited or rejected entirely. 92% of re-exam requests are granted, with 3 out of every 4 exams resulting in adjustments (or total rejections) of the patents. In other words, clearly, the process helps improve patent quality. So why would Congress want to remove that part?

However, a much bigger question should probably be: why is the Patent Office so bad at getting things right the first time around? If so many patents end up needing to be corrected on re-exam, it certainly sounds like patent examiners aren't doing a very good job. Given the already massive economic costs that result from bad patents, this should be a major concern.

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Will Infamous JPEG Patent Get A Re-Exam?

from the about-time dept

We've already talked about how Ray Niro, a well-known patent attorney, has been filing lawsuits over a patent he claims covers any website with a JPEG image. He's been known to particularly target his critics. It appears that all of the attention this patent has generated, has resulted in at least one party filing with the Patent Office to request a re-exam of the patent. While the patent has already gone through a re-exam in the past, and only this one claim survived, it would be nice to get it completely rejected.

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