DOCSLIB.ORG

View Report 2015 Annual Report

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
View Report 2015 Annual Report 2015 Annual Report © Invent Now, Inc. United States Patent and Trademark Office Partnership The United States Patent and Trademark Office CIC is the only competition in the country where Letter from the CEO (USPTO) is a founding partner of NIHF and student finalists are judged by a panel of NIHF In 2015, we continued to implement our vision to be the Hall What distinguishes our organization from all others is our Invent Now Mission continues to support our programs and national Inductees and USPTO officials for feedback, of Fame that pays it forward by spreading our mission to core, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and our relationship outreach to inspire innovation in America. brainstorming, and encouragement on advancing inspire innovation in America. Big talk backed up by decisive with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), their innovation and intellectual property protection. action last year: 123,000 K-12 students, led by 8,000 of our a founding partner. The USPTO, the ultimate purveyor of We inspire innovation Through decades of collaboration, the USPTO’s nation’s best teachers from 1,500 outstanding school districts, intellectual property, is home to the National Inventors Hall of investment has propelled Camp Invention, Club Finally, the National Inventors Hall of Fame museum were immersed in our programming from Camp Invention and Fame Museum, which is worth a trip to Alexandria, VA, just in America. Invention, and Invention Project to be the largest is located on the USPTO headquarters campus Club Invention (pages 3-6) to Invention Project (pages 7-8) outside Washington, DC. The featured, permanent exhibit is the K-12 nonprofit programs encouraging the inventive in Alexandria, Virginia, serving as our country’s ® to our intellectual property and leadership training for high National Monument of Innovation®, our Wall of Icons that pays The mission of Invent Now is to be a catalyst for positive change spirit and imaginations of children nationwide. These National Monument to Innovation . The NIHF schoolers. Over 34,000 of these beneficiaries were underserved tribute to Inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. through recognizing inventors and invention, promoting creativity, programs are uniquely inspired by stories of our Gallery of Icons and exhibits share the inspiration students who were provided scholarship assistance thanks The 2015 Induction Ceremony held at the Smithsonian American and advancing the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. NIHF Inductees, the foremost invention experts in of men and women who have significantly impacted to the generosity of our sponsors, proactive investors in the Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC the world, and backed by the USPTO. our world. The first National Inventors Hall of future of innovation (page 6, 19, and 20). Our sponsor partners was without a doubt the best ever, honoring the inspirations, Invent Now was founded in 1973 as the National Inventors Hall Fame Induction Ceremony was held at the USPTO Recognizing the innovative research in American understand invention and creativity are level playing fields desperations, and breakthroughs of 14 new Inductees who are of Fame (NIHF), now a supporting organization, with the mission in 1973, and 43 years later we proudly continue colleges and universities, the USPTO also supports and all children have the innate ability to creatively solve now helping us inspire future generations. of recognizing and honoring the great inventors of our time. our partnership to recognize the world’s greatest our Collegiate Inventors Competition (CIC). Together, problems and invent solutions. The Collegiate Inventors Since then, we have impacted more than two million children, innovators and inspire future generations through we encourage invention, entrepreneurship, and Competition (pages 9-12), held at the United States Patent We’re rolling into 2016 with a clear vision for delivering our teachers, college students, entrepreneurs, and aspiring inventors, the world’s greatest inventors. creativity in undergraduate and graduate students and Trademark Office, gives our K-12 students from across the mission and continuing to pay it forward. We’re providing and recognized the men and women whose inventions have who are working on cutting-edge inventions. country something to ambitiously strive for. Collegians from programming that empowers children of all ages to recognize revolutionized our world. Michael J. Oister 112 of the country’s best colleges and universities registered and harness their innate ability to innovate and solve problems Chief Executive Officer their inventions, and the contest culminated last November using science, technology, engineering, and math. We’re providing with six teams medaling (pages 9-10). All finalists benefitted children content rich with examples and stories from truly from interaction with and advice from the world’s greatest innovative role models, men and women who have succeeded, inventors and a wide range of innovation and intellectual against all odds, to save millions of lives, create industries, enable property experts. worldwide connectivity, and serve as the purveyors of our quality 516 Inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame Nearly 2,100 philanthropic partners of life: the Inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. 2015 By the Numbers 5,427 Camp Invention volunteers Over 34,000 underserved children impacted Impacted over 122,000 children and 4,652,701 Website Visitors 14,500 educators through education outreach 5,010 Twitter followers Leaders in STEM programming for the 26th year Over media impressions Michael J. Oister Impacted over 10,000 middle and high school youth as Camp 6 Billion ™ ™ Chief Executive Officer Invention Leadership Interns and Counselors-in-Training Over 1,200 school partners in 49 states Over 260 tons of materials shipped Impacted over 2,800 Collegiate Inventors Competition participants 43,422 Facebook fans for education outreach programs 1 | 2015 ANNUAL REPORT 2 | 2015 ANNUAL REPORT Where big ideas become the next BIG thing.™ Camp Invention Camp Invention, the cornerstone of our K-12 that help people live better, construct strong educational programs, gives children in grades one mega-towers, and launch rockets to space. through six the opportunity to prototype, create, It also impacted nearly 1,400 schools and served and explore new innovations. Camp Invention more than 94,000 1st - 6th graders nationwide. summer and Club Invention after-school programs The goals for 2016 are even higher, and with new nurture a child’s curiosity into big ideas through curriculum that features over 50 inventors from immersive curricula that encourage creativity and the National Inventors Hall of Fame posing video innovation. With new programming each and every challenges and elevating children’s knowledge year, boys and girls new to camp or returning to of STEM and inventing, we are confident they will camp are guaranteed to have a unique and exciting be achieved. experience. Our 2015 program enabled children to explore engineering by building vehicles from Visit http://campinvention.org/2016-program/ skateboards and sleds, discover medical inventions to experience the 2016 curriculum in action. 3 | 2015 ANNUAL REPORT 4 | 2015 ANNUAL REPORT An Industry Leader Through a major third party evaluation project and various surveys, we have discovered that Learning Outcomes are on the forefront of parent’s minds when it comes to their children’s education. This is great news. Our programs are statistically shown to increase creative fluency and flexibility, originality, “The Army Educational Outreach Program or and the ability to elaborate - all of which have been AEOP is extremely pleased with the partnership shown to increase academic achievement. it has established with Invent Now in support of Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the relative Camp Invention and in providing opportunities to amount of customers who are promoters of a brand underserved students. The Army through AEOP or company, versus customers who are detractors. provides K-12 students and college students By knowing this score, companies can understand to what degree their products and/or services are STEM continuum of opportunities in the form of achieving customer satisfaction. The standard NPS question is: “How likely is it that you would recommend competitions, summer enrichment activities and our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” Camp Invention’s Alumni NPS of 67% is a leader research apprenticeships. One of the first steps in in the education industry’s NPS average of 63%. Here’s what some of our parents are saying about us: AEOP’s continuum is Camp Invention.” Steve Sasson, NIHF Inductee, at Camp Invention Louie R. Lopez “The change in his attitude towards learning was remarkable. Absolutely sending him again.” AEOP Cooperative Agreement Manager, Inductees who went “It pushed her to accomplish things she didn’t know she could.” U.S. Army Research Development and Engineering Command to Camp Summer 2015 “He cried when we left on the last day, he didn’t want it to end. The camp took a love of science and gave it wings!” George Alcorn Kumar Patel X-Ray Spectrometer Carbon Dioxide Laser Richard DiMarchi Steve Sasson Insulin LisPro (Humalog®) Digital Camera Bridging the Gap/Title I In Partnership with Federico Faggin Gary Sharp We are pleased to report that our Camp Invention and Invention Project programs are building a strong Microprocessor
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Factory of the Future?
    Factory of the Future? Microsoft alum Nathan Myhrvold runs a firm that doesn't make anything, but it's hoarding the key to a new business age: intellectual property By Brad Stone Newsweek Nov. 22, 2004 issue - The offices of the highly secretive Seattle-area start-up, Intellectual Ventures, are filled with evidence of the multiple hobbies of its polymath founder, Nathan Myhrvold. The multimillionaire former chief technologist at Microsoft is a scientist, so there's a collection of antique microscopes in his office. He is a photographer, so striking pictures of nature adorn all the walls. He is an avid writer, so antique typewriters line the hallway. And since he is also a paleontologist, the full-scale head of a T. rex lords it over the lobby. It's actually a replica of the model used in the second "Jurassic Park" Robbie McClaran for Newsweek film. 'Wild and crazy' guy: Myhrvold The dino's ferociously bared teeth hint at elements of Intellectual Ventures' bold business plan. Myhrvold and his partner, former Microsoft chief software architect Edward Jung, have created the quintessential company for the 21st century. It doesn't actually make anything: it outsources, offshores and offloads nearly every task performed by regular corporations. It has no factories, machine shops or marketing teams. Only patent attorneys populate the quiet hallways. The five-year-old firm's plan is to create or buy new ideas, accumulate patents—exclusive rights to use the inventions—and rent those ideas to companies that need them to do the gritty work of producing real products.
    [Show full text]
  • Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting
    Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting Michael Webb Nick Short Nicholas Bloom Josh Lerner Working Paper 19-014 Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting Michael Webb Nick Short Stanford University Harvard Kennedy School Nicholas Bloom Josh Lerner Stanford University Harvard Business School Working Paper 19-014 Copyright © 2018 by Michael Webb, Nick Short, Nicholas Bloom, and Josh Lerner Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting Michael Webb, Nick Short, Nicholas Bloom, and Josh Lerner NBER Working Paper No. 24793 July 2018 JEL No. L86,O34 ABSTRACT Patenting in software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has grown rapidly in recent years. Such patents are acquired primarily by large US technology firms such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, and HP, as well as by Japanese multinationals such as Sony, Canon, and Fujitsu. Chinese patenting in the US is small but growing rapidly, and world-leading for drone technology. Patenting in machine learning has seen exponential growth since 2010, although patenting in neural networks saw a strong burst of activity in the 1990s that has only recently been surpassed. In all technological fields, the number of patents per inventor has declined near-monotonically, except for large increases in inventor productivity in software and semiconductors in the late 1990s. In most high-tech fields, Japan is the only country outside the US with significant US patenting activity; however, whereas Japan played an important role in the burst of neural network patenting in the 1990s, it has not been involved in the current acceleration.
    [Show full text]
  • THE DEFENSIVE PATENT PLAYBOOK James M
    THE DEFENSIVE PATENT PLAYBOOK James M. Rice† Billionaire entrepreneur Naveen Jain wrote that “[s]uccess doesn’t necessarily come from breakthrough innovation but from flawless execution. A great strategy alone won’t win a game or a battle; the win comes from basic blocking and tackling.”1 Companies with innovative ideas must execute patent strategies effectively to navigate the current patent landscape. But in order to develop a defensive strategy, practitioners must appreciate the development of the defensive patent playbook. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”2 Congress attempts to promote technological progress by granting patent rights to inventors. Under the utilitarian theory of patent law, patent rights create economic incentives for inventors by providing exclusivity in exchange for public disclosure of technology.3 The exclusive right to make, use, import, and sell a technology incentivizes innovation by enabling inventors to recoup the costs of development and secure profits in the market.4 Despite the conventional theory, in the 1980s and early 1990s, numerous technology companies viewed patents as unnecessary and chose not to file for patents.5 In 1990, Microsoft had seven utility patents.6 Cisco © 2015 James M. Rice. † J.D. Candidate, 2016, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. 1. Naveen Jain, 10 Secrets of Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur, INC. (Aug. 13, 2012), http://www.inc.com/naveen-jain/10-secrets-of-becoming-a-successful- entrepreneur.html.
    [Show full text]
  • George Eastman Museum Annual Report 2016
    George Eastman Museum Annual Report 2016 Contents Exhibitions 2 Traveling Exhibitions 3 Film Series at the Dryden Theatre 4 Programs & Events 5 Online 7 Education 8 The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation 8 Photographic Preservation & Collections Management 9 Photography Workshops 10 Loans 11 Objects Loaned for Exhibitions 11 Film Screenings 15 Acquisitions 17 Gifts to the Collections 17 Photography 17 Moving Image 22 Technology 23 George Eastman Legacy 24 Purchases for the Collections 29 Photography 29 Technology 30 Conservation & Preservation 31 Conservation 31 Photography 31 Moving Image 36 Technology 36 George Eastman Legacy 36 Richard & Ronay Menschel Library 36 Preservation 37 Moving Image 37 Financial 38 Treasurer’s Report 38 Fundraising 40 Members 40 Corporate Members 43 Matching Gift Companies 43 Annual Campaign 43 Designated Giving 45 Honor & Memorial Gifts 46 Planned Giving 46 Trustees, Advisors & Staff 47 Board of Trustees 47 George Eastman Museum Staff 48 George Eastman Museum, 900 East Avenue, Rochester, NY 14607 Exhibitions Exhibitions on view in the museum’s galleries during 2016. Alvin Langdon Coburn Sight Reading: ONGOING Curated by Pamela G. Roberts and organized for Photography and the Legible World From the Camera Obscura to the the George Eastman Museum by Lisa Hostetler, Curated by Lisa Hostetler, Curator in Charge, Revolutionary Kodak Curator in Charge, Department of Photography Department of Photography, and Joel Smith, Curated by Todd Gustavson, Curator, Technology Main Galleries Richard L. Menschel
    [Show full text]
  • P106 - Word Count: 2,818
    Brian Schnack ([email protected]) Garrett Thompson ([email protected]) Group: P106 - Word Count: 2,818 Patents and Technology The patent system was designed to promote intellectual innovation and to protect inventions from being stolen, allowing small companies to thrive if their ideas are new and innovative. The founding fathers thought it was so important to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” that they wrote it directly into the U.S. Constitution (US Constitution, 8). However in recent years, with patents on programming algorithms and different electronic components, the patent system has started to inhibit innovation. The current methodology of the US patent system does not promote intellectual inventions in software and technology, but instead allows companies to abuse the patent system. Companies misuse the patent system to make money through lawsuits rather than innovation, hurting businesses and ultimately the consumer. Slowly, through the judicial court, things are beginning to shape up but the United States is still a long way away from a patent system that actually does promote intellectual innovation. One large company that uses the broken patent system to their advantage is Intellectual Ventures, a company that attempts to help small time inventors protect their intellectual property by buying their patents, a move they call investing in their inventions. Unfortunately, this is not how it usually plays out, and Intellectual Ventures ends up selling patents to companies who attempt to make money purely by suing other companies who are infringing on the patents that they just bought. Many companies that Intellectual Ventures sells patents to are not even companies, but individuals pretending to be a company who will then use those patents to sue actual companies to make quick and easy money.
    [Show full text]
  • Patents & Legal Expenditures
    Patents & Legal Expenditures Christopher J. Ryan, Jr. & Brian L. Frye* I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 577 A. A Brief History of University Patents ................................................. 578 B. The Origin of University Patents ........................................................ 578 C. University Patenting as a Function of Patent Policy Incentives ........ 580 D. The Business of University Patenting and Technology Transfer ....... 581 E. Trends in Patent Litigation ................................................................. 584 II. DATA AND ANALYSIS .................................................................................... 588 III. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................. 591 I. INTRODUCTION Universities are engines of innovation. To encourage further innovation, the federal government and charitable foundations give universities grants in order to enable university researchers to produce the inventions and discoveries that will continue to fuel our knowledge economy. Among other things, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 was supposed to encourage additional innovation by enabling universities to patent inventions and discoveries produced using federal funds and to license those patents to private companies, rather than turning their patent rights over to the government. The Bayh-Dole Act unquestionably encouraged universities to patent inventions and license their patents.
    [Show full text]
  • Summer 2018 Bulletin
    CELEBRATING OUR 147TH YEAR OF SERVICE KEHILATH JESHURUN BULLETIN Volume LXXXVIII, Number 4 June 22, 2018 9 Tammuz 5778 CALL Y OUR MOTHER by Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz ate in his career, South Central Bell the most spiritual man needs to eat a and groaning Telephone Company asked the nourishing lunch. and possibly LUniversity of Alabama football But katnut hamochin becomes a in pain. The coach Bear Bryant to do a TV commercial. problem when it monopolizes your “victim” had In it, Bryant would tell the audience how consciousness. It’s easy to fixate on the been put there he encourages his young football recruits details and lose sight of the big picture. by Dr. Batson to call home. The script called for Coach Minding the mundane can rapidly devolve and Professor Darley Bryant to end the commercial in his tough, into small mindedness. to see if the seminarians would play the gruff voice and say: “Have you called your A classic example of this is the role of the Good Samaritan - or pass him mama today?” instinctive response to hurry. by…… On the day of the filming, Coach On April 10, 1971, The New York Of the 40, a total of 16 stopped to help. Bryant ad-libbed the ending, and with an Times reported about two academics at Twenty-four did not swerve from their emotional voice said: “Have you called Princeton: path. One even stepped over the “victim” your mama today? I sure wish I could call Prof. John M. Darley, who teaches to get through the doorway he had mine.” psychology at the university, and C.
    [Show full text]
  • How Valuable Is Your Patent, Really?
    1 2 3 4 • These are factors that go beyond the usual realm of a patent prosecution counsel • broad claims • well supported by spec • clean prosecution history • Timely issuance • Can the patent stand alone as an asset? à How much is the patent worth in the market place? 5 • Life after AIA • Presumption of validity at the district court level is no longer there • Parallel proceedings at PTAB • High rate of IPR institution and claim cancellation (especially at the outset of AIA) • While the application of AIA rules and new processes are being hashed out, presumption of validity is definitely gone. • Case law is always evolving – Pendulum still swinging • Gottschalk v. Benson • Parker v. Flook • Diamond v. Diehr • State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group • In re Bilski • Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International • DDR Holdings v. Hotels.com (one patent held as patentable! • Enfish v. Microsoft • Certain PTAB decisions being designated precedential 6 http://www.ncsl.org/research/financial-services-and-commerce/2016-patent-troll- legislation.aspx http://www.law360.com/articles/836578/the-post-aia-battleground-for-patent- challenges http://www.finnegan.com/resources/articles/articlesdetail.aspx?news=3aad1da2- 08a9-4f14-a147-611b1e39ff75 ITC: Availability of Cease and Desist orders and Limited or General Exclusion Orders; speedy proceedings “anti-patent troll” — i.e., entities that have made a business out of directly challenging patents via IPR for financial gain (“...IPR process is being misused by hedge fund companies whose motive isn't
    [Show full text]
  • Intellectual Ventures Comments
    INTELLECTUAL VENTURES" July 3, 2018 By Mail & Email ([email protected]) The Honorable Andrew lancu Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office United States Patent & Trademark Office Mail Stop Patent Board P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, VA 22313-1450 Attention Vice Chief Administrative Patent Judges Michael Tierney or Jacqueline Wright Bonilla, PTAB Notice of Proposed Rulemaking 2018. Dear Under Secretary lancu: Intellectual Ventures Management LLC ("Intellectual Ventures") thanks the Director for the opportunity to present its views on the United States Patent & Trademark Office ("Office") Notice of Proposed Rulemak­ ing entitled "Changes to the Claim Construction Standard for Interpreting Claims in Trial Proceedings Be­ fore the Patent Trial and Appeal Board" as published in the May 9, 2018 issue of the Federal Register, 83 Fed. Reg. 21,221 ("Notice"). Intellectual Ventures urges the Office to adopt the rules proposed in the Notice. About Intellectual Ventures Intellectual Ventures fosters conception, development, and investment in inventions. It was co-founded by Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, who is also its Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Myhrvold was previously the Chief Tech­ nology Officer of Microsoft, and he holds a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics and a mas­ ter's degree in mathematical economics from Princeton University, as well as a master's degree in geo­ physics and space physics and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the quantum physics laboratory of Dr. Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University. And he is a named inventor on hundreds of issued patents.
    [Show full text]
  • How Digital Cameras Capture Light
    1 Open Your Shutters How Digital Cameras Capture Light Avery Cirincione­Lynch Eighth Grade Project Paper Hilltown Cooperative Charter School June 2014 2 Cover image courtesy of tumblr.com How Can I Develop This: Introduction Imagine you are walking into a dark room; at first you can't see anything, but as your pupils begin to dilate, you can start to see the details and colors of the room. Now imagine you are holding a film camera in a field of flowers on a sunny day; you focus on a beautiful flower and snap a picture. Once you develop it, it comes out just how you wanted it to so you hang it on your wall. Lastly, imagine you are standing over that same flower, but, this time after snapping the photograph, instead of having to developing it, you can just download it to a computer and print it out. All three of these scenarios are examples of capturing light. Our eyes use an optic nerve in the back of the eye that converts the image it senses into a set of electric signals and transmits it to the brain (Wikipedia, Eye). Film cameras use film; once the image is projected through the lens and on to the film, a chemical reaction occurs recording the light. Digital cameras use electronic sensors in the back of the camera to capture the light. Currently, there are two main types of sensors used for digital photography: the charge­coupled device (CCD) and complementary metal­oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors. Both of these methods convert the intensity of the light at each pixel into binary form, so the picture can be displayed and saved as a digital file (Wikipedia, Image Sensor).
    [Show full text]
  • The Opinion in Support of the Decision Being Entered Today Was
    [email protected] Paper No. 18 571-272-7822 Entered: July 23, 2018 UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________ EBAY INC. and PAYPAL, INC., Petitioner, v. XPRT VENTURES, LLC, Patent Owner. ____________ Case CBM2017-00027 Patent 7,483,856 B2 ____________ Before JAMESON LEE, KEVIN F. TURNER, and MICHAEL R. ZECHER, Administrative Patent Judges. ZECHER, Administrative Patent Judge. FINAL WRITTEN DECISION Covered Business Method Patent Review 35 U.S.C. § 328(a) and 37 C.F.R. § 42.73 CBM2017-00027 Patent 7,483,856 B2 I. INTRODUCTION eBay Inc. and PayPal, Inc. (collectively, “Petitioner”), filed a Petition requesting a review under the transitional program for covered business method patents of claims 1, 5, 6, 8, 34, 35, 45, and 48 (“challenged claims”) of U.S. Patent No. 7,483,856 B2 (Ex. 1001, “’856 patent”). Paper 1 (“Pet.”). Patent Owner, XPRT Ventures, LLC (“Patent Owner”), did not file a Preliminary Response. We preliminarily determined that the information presented in the Petition established that the ’856 patent qualifies as a covered business method patent that is eligible for review, and that it was more likely than not that the challenged claims are unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Paper 8. Pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 324 and § 18(a) of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (“AIA”), Pub. L. No. 112-29, 125 Stat. 284, 329–31 (2011), we instituted a covered business method patent review as to all of the challenged claims. Id. Patent Owner filed a Response to the Petition (Paper 13 (“PO Resp.”)), and Petitioner filed a Reply (Paper 14 (“Pet.
    [Show full text]
  • CPI Antitrust Chronicle January 2015 (2)
    CPI Antitrust Chronicle January 2015 (2) Intellectual Ventures v. Capital One: Can Antitrust Law and Economics Get Us Past the Trolls? Michelle D. Miller (WilmerHale) & Janusz A. Ordover (New York University) www.competitionpolicyinternational.com Competition Policy International, Inc. 2015© Copying, reprinting, or distributing this article is forbidden by anyone other than the publisher or author. CPI Antitrust Chronicle January 2015 (2) Intellectual Ventures v. Capital One: Can Antitrust Law and Economics Get Us Past the Trolls? Michelle D. Miller & Janusz A. Ordover1 I. INTRODUCTION Patent trolls are currently under intense scrutiny by lawmakers, regulators, academics, and industry players. The term “patent troll” generally refers to patent owners that do not make or sell products, and instead focus on licensing and litigation to monetize their acquired patents. These entities are also known as “patent assertion entities” (PAEs)2, and in this paper, we use the terms interchangeably. Infringement suits brought by trolls have exploded over the last few years—in 2012 patent trolls accounted for 62 percent of all patent infringement suits,3 and recent studies estimate that trolls imposed direct costs of $29 billion in 2011.4 And these costs appear to be deterring investment in new businesses and technologies—one study estimated that venture capital funding was $8.1 billion lower over a five-year period than it would have been without PAE enforcement.5 Although most commentators have concluded that many patent troll business models lead to market inefficiencies, it is not clear what can be done in the short term to address the wide variety of concerns that troll activities raise.6 Various legislative solutions have been suggested 1 Michelle Miller is a partner in the Antitrust and Competition Group of WilmerHale.
    [Show full text]